


There Are Always

by BadWolf256



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-06-24 09:22:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 38,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19720819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolf256/pseuds/BadWolf256
Summary: In which, after the war, Sansa Stark returns to Winterfell and realizes that everything's changed.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So. This has been in the works for awhile. I don't really know what to say about this one - it's not like most of the things that I work on (Though, pleasantly, that also means that most of it is already completed!) but I've wanted to try my hand on a darker SanSan AU for awhile now, and it seemed like a good time to put this out here. 
> 
> While this is an angst fic, I have tried to make it as tasteful as possible. It references a lot of canon - even the darker things, at times - so be warned in advance if that's not your thing. There are plenty of other really, _really_ good modern SanSan AU's out there - if you want a lighter, less angsty take on things, you should probably try something else. 
> 
> That being said, I hope that you guys like this work! If you do like it and want to drop a comment below (Or, god forbid, beta for me), let me know in the comments below. I highly value you guys's input and will take advice into consideration while finishing and editing what's left of this story! 
> 
> Disclaimer: As always, if I owned them, they wouldn't keep me up at night.

Asleep, and dreaming; there are fingers on her scars.

*

His name is Sandor Clegane, but they will call him the Hound.

He is a born to a mother of two other children, in a town without a name. There is Gregor, the oldest, the one who made his mother quiet; and there is Eleanor, the middle child, the one who dies too young. And who, when he was a boy who was small for his age, made him chicken soup in their grandmother’s bowls. 

_She brought them back from Italy, you know,_ says Eleanor, thirty-four years gone, _In the bottom of her suitcase, running from the mob._ She would have wiped her mouth on her hand then. A wipe that started with the hand and ended at the elbow, as swift and as sharp as the strike of a violin bow. _She would’a loved you, know that?_ Eleanor was always talking about their grandmother. An intrepid woman, Eleanor called her, who sailed across the saintless ocean when she was only five, who married at the age of fourteen to a man in the mafia; and who would cross that ocean again, for America, when he showed her his true colors. Thing is, she said to him, when the broth had rock-bottomed and the fire was high in the grating, _He lives in us. You an’ I an’ Gregor - There’s a lotta him, in Gregor._ That was what Eleanor said. 

He has a flat in the heart of the old market, where the families flock in droves; and the young’uns, out after dark, throw rocks at the hermit man’s windows. He sometimes hears the glass. Often, when the streetlights go on and the pups are called home, he stands at the giving-in windows, tracing each crack with the pads of his paws; just to see if this time he’ll feel blood. In the mornings, he rises early and walks the city blocks to work. He takes the back alleys that branch out like arteries; mazes of brickage and bracken and shit-splattered hovels. Sparing no thought for his safety, sparing no time for his health; he finds that it is quiet here, and easier to think. Besides, in the alleyways, noone can see.

* 

Her name is Sansa Stark, but her sister calls her Sansa. She calls her this indignantly, as if it her birthright, and perhaps, in some ways, it is. The Starks are an old family, the kind of family that can afford indulging their nastier traits. Arya certainly has them. The girl would rather be a murderer than a lady; and the Starks are an old family. There are traditions that they are not permitted to break. So Sansa does what they ask of her and sews with the others in the solar; neat lines, the Septa says, that would serve the army well. She tosses for hours in bed when she hears it; she had never considered the army before, had never considered any path save marriage, and yet there is pride in her work. Shameful, selfish pride. It’s something, she thinks, that Arya would do. Run away and join the army. It’s something that Arya would do to break all of their hearts.

Sansa dreams of dancing with a blond-haired boy in a ballroom carved from the hull of a mountain. She doesn’t think of the army again.

* 

He spends his days sorting files and breathing in smoke. The files: Alphabetical, categorical, colored manilla or cream. The smoke: Accompanied. Everything the organization does is nonprofit. The filing is merely volunteer work. But it keeps his hands busy, and his mind away from the gunfire; it is, he has decided, the most that he can ask for. They tried to give him medals, when the war was over, but he pushed them back across the table. Medals couldn’t bring his sister back. Medals couldn’t do him any good. Except to remind him of simpler times, when what he wanted more than anything was for the words that he read to make sense; when his world was reduced to the dark and the coarse strips of bandages. There was a time, he remembers, when he relished the scars. There was a time when he relished the war, too. There was a time, he knows, for everything, and there is a time when everything dies.

* 

Arya, in the solar,

“You’re just like mother. Gods, Sansa, she’ll leave you with Rickon and you’ll let her!” 

The putting down of sewing; the folding of halfway-made handkerchief. 

“What does Rickon have to do with anything?” 

“Well it’s either that or you marry some - some _lordling.”_ Arya ruffs up the hair she wears short; her mouth a thin line of disdain. “He wouldn’t fuck you. You’re not old enough, Jon says.”

“Language, Arya.” 

“You and your _language._ It’ll get us all killed.” 

“And who do you think’s out to kill us?”

“Everyone, Jon says.” 

Jon, who isn’t their brother, who her sister trusts more than the gods. If she prayed as much as quoting Jon, there’d be world peace by now. It makes sense, or so the family says. Arya is the strange girl, and Jon is the bastard. They would get on well. Still, it sours her. Jon is a bastard; he’s made their mother cry. And Arya talks about her as if she’s a Walker from Nan’s stories, some child-eating dead thing that doesn’t know a thing about caring. 

“Jon,” She says, “Hasn’t left home once in his life.” 

(It is, strictly, true. He makes his home everywhere he goes. So there.) 

“He will do,” Says Arya. Too confident. Too assured. “He’ll go North, to the Artic; ‘crossed the ocean and everything. He’ll take me with him, and Nymeria. Wait and see.” 

She likes to think of Arya that day, if she thinks of her. Stubborn and obstinate and so sure of herself that her very words could bring her joy. It is better that, she’s found, than thinking of her dead. 

Summertime here is a sweltering heat. It sweeps the streets of dogs and wastrels, driving them indoors. In the coffeehouses, the air conditioning blares and the music’s turned down low. In the libraries, every bathroom stall is full. Washing her hands in the kitchen sink, she watches the slug-fat cockroaches scamper like worms through the drain-hole. _It’s hardly the best I can do,_ he had told her, _But given the circumstances, I should think you would be grateful._ Indeed, she is inordinately grateful: The bedsit is hers, all leaky faucets and moldy roof and termite walls and dirty, rotting mattress of it. Nobody can touch her here. In late evenings, if bored, she can throw on her woolens and face the chill of nearing-sunset as she strolls the rock gardens and ancient statuaries. Perhaps she sees herself in the stone-chiseled visages of foreign maids; or Arya in the scowls of the limestone warriors; Bran in the wise men’s watery blindness. Perhaps she sees her father in the line of every hero, or her mother in the songs that she hums as she’s walking; or perhaps it isn’t anyone she’s seeing, but the world after the long war; torn and tired and trying, trying, trying to put itself together. 

Perhaps, she asks, when even the grey skies have darkened, she doesn’t see things at all.

Twice monthly, on Saturdays, she dines at Sept Baelor with her brother. Bran is tall and thin and gangly and crippled; his wheelchair is a sleek oak onepiece, and though he feigns disinterest, he soaks up attention like cacti soak up the desert rain. He thinks it theatrical to lunch where their father was murdered, and also dramatic; as she can’t imagine him ever accepting her refusal, she’s resigned. The lunches go as she would expect; there is much talk of old scandals and the flitters of their mother, Catelyn Tully, and the Queen’s late adviser Petyr Baelish; none of which is surprising to her in the least. Bran is family geneologist and family gossip in equal measure. He has recently taken to calling himself the Three Eyed Raven, and saying the past has shown him its visions. _Cut him slack,_ says Arya, whenever the subject of Bran was broached, before the war, at Winterfell. _He was pushed off the roof by Cersei Lannister’s brother._ How Arya was so certain escapes her; mayhaps the Three Eyed Raven had visited her, too. Either way, she listened to her sister. Some morbid part of her, the same part she shares with Bran, craves knowledge of the man who sold her down the river, and wants to hate her mother for putting love in her voice whilst speaking his name. Besides, telling him to stop - stop bringing up the past already, would you! - seems hypocritical to Sansa. After all, she still sleeps with Sandor Clegane’s sweatshirt. 

The sweatshirt, Arya tells her, is what gets to her after all this time. Or she would, if she were there, or alive, or any number of things that she isn’t. What color it used to be is impossible now to tell; though she carries fleeting, hasty memories of whiteness. Memory, though, is a frail mistress; frailer than Aunt Lysa of the Eerie, and so she takes no stock in it, if any, and holds the shirt as if it always were that mix of blood and sweat and brown-grime no amount of heavy cycles at the laundromat can cure. These days, in her dreamings, when it whispers that she could have gone with him, it’s voice, which is his, blows down from the hound-howling trees of the weirwood with twice as much strength; and twice as much sound.

* 

It is a trick to shed visibility in the city; in the summertime, a guarantee. He is no north-born fool; so the sun and the heat are his sun and his seat; his cloak, and his armor. The men at his work take him out drinking, because they feel sorry for him, and he takes notes on their folly as he loses himself to thick, boot-polish wine. Tonight, it is the ginger one talking - Tormund, he overheard at the water cooler - trying to win himself a girl. The girl in question:

“Sorry, giant lady?” 

That, then, would be Bronn. The sellsword, as he’s known, the office accountant and wartime assassin-for-hire. But they don’t talk about the war. They talk about the ‘giant lady’, and it is not lost to him; its meaning, this sitting at a bar. 

“Brienne. She suckled from the same teat’s I, make no mistake.” He takes a hearty swig of ale, then, the drink of choice amongst the Watch, and grins. “Giant’s teat, sure as day.” 

“Brienne?” He chimes in, then, as it seems the safest time, “The Tarth woman? Thought she was with Lannister.” 

“Can’t be with a dead man, can she?” Asks Tormund, shooting a glance at a shrugging Bronn. 

“Times are over, fire-kissed. Find yourself another marksman; I’ve a life to live. Hell, ask the Hound to do it- “ 

“Don’t.” 

“As you like. But don’t go asking me.” 

It wouldn’t, he reflects, walking home, be the worst thing asked of him. They demanded far worse in the army than stupid, idiot Tormund could’ve done. It isn’t, either, about perserving his honor; he hadn’t that to start with. What it boils down to, in the end, is what he sees when looking underneath the booth-top; a mangled excuse of a leg. King Joffrey’s Hound, too slow to keep up with the hunt.

* 

“Name a price,” It does not stop him from inquiring of his mirror in a fortnight. The refrain is as familiar as it is loathed, by everyone else if not him. The mirror reflects the leg back to him; and the scars come with, a topographic map in stark relief. There are the crags and the valleys, but these mountains will never see their fill of winter’s snow. They remind him of the roads they used to take to see the wildlings burn; of how he turned away. And of course, his brother, who might have picked that name on purpose, for all that he would know. It doesn’t remind him of Sansa; but he’s thinking of her now.

She was always so weak, it seemed, always so gullible, and at times it made him laugh; for he saw she had a head on those shoulders; that, should she choose, she could be as smart or as daring as any of her fellows. On the television, when they discuss the war, they say that it started on the steps of Sept Baelor, when Ned Stark lost his head. But Sandor knows the war began long prior; in the arduous, stifling months of Sansa’s beatings and humiliation. Few men knew of it; yet still it was the war. Much was different, during wartime. He hopes the same can be said of her.

* 

There are always places to go in the city; places where everyone is. She has a taste for the crypts, but she hates the stairs to the subway. On the balconies, when she blinks, she only sees the heads on their spikes. Even Winterfell could be foreign to her; a haunted manor, where ghosts flit the hallways, and few of them welcome. She accepts the invitation, though. It is Arya inviting her; Arya, who seldom cares for guests.

_I miss you, sweet sister _, she has written, and embedded a roll of the eyes. _It would please me greatly if you came home for a weekend.___

__Winterfell is not her home. It has not been her home for years._ _

___I miss you, sweet sister_ , Arya had written. _ _

__She packs the sweatshirt first._ _

__Arya’s car is waiting for her Tuesday, by the steps. Her husband - yes, her _husband _, in everything but law - mans the driver’s seat.___ _

____“When did you get married?” Is what she asks, when the door clicks open like the slide of a Blackberry’s front-flip._ _ _ _

____“When Gendry asked.” Arya says, flipping her off, “Soon.”_ _ _ _

____She has kept the old house well. A grand old house, in the middle of the northern nowhere, which is where they should like it. The Starks had always lived in the north-lands, for centuries and centuries; so that until their mother Catelyn no southern maid had laid foot on the soil. When the long winter came, their father had told them - Her and Robb and Arya and Bran and Jon and Rickon - they alone would survive it. It was never a matter of ‘if’ with their father. It was a matter of ‘when’. _Winter is coming_ , he would say, as any other parent would say _Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite._ The Stark words. _ _ _ _

____The Clegane’s, or so she’s heard, have none, but she thinks if they did they would be something like the Lannisters’. To do with honor, maybe; an honor ill-suited to her father’s, but albeit an honor. The blunt-steel honor of honesty. Or maybe they do, and the news has not reached her. It was early on, when Cersei shut down the press. Winterfell, of all things, is as it was before the war._ _ _ _

____All ranges and horseriding trails and the sturdy weirwood tree. The Great Hall where their father would sit while entertaining dusty but congruent: Chairs upon chairs round the common tables. The direwolf mural still painted on the walls in its muted, quirrilous ice. There are direwolf rugs in the bedrooms still, too, and faux-furs on the beds. She looks at them, and touches with the hesitance of a girl no longer assured of her position, when Arya enters; swift as a shadow, swift as a cat._ _ _ _

____“They used to be real, you know.” She says, “But they burned, or something, and there weren’t any direwolves, anymore. We thought that there might be, remember?”_ _ _ _

____She does; the pups, abnormally large, that they found on the side of the highway that ran south of the Wall. It was Bran’s first shooting, and stupid Jon had bade him not close his eyes. That a boy should have to see such things - Anyways, they had found the pups, lapping at their dead mother’s corpse, wounded by cars or by Walkers, and Jon, stupid Jon, had suggested bringing them home._ _ _ _

____“It wasn’t his fault,” Arya says._ _ _ _

____“I didn’t mention it.”_ _ _ _

____“You wanted to, though.”_ _ _ _

____“And so what if I did? What kind of a welcome is this, sister? Inviting me home just to taunt me with Lady - I had forgotten you, Arya.”_ _ _ _

____“I had forgotten you too, _sweet sister_. I only meant to say that we survived it. The burning. You were the one who brought Jon into it, and he never did anything. If it weren’t for Jon, you wouldn’t ever have _had_ Lady, or Bran Summer, or I Nymeria. Why, Sansa, you ought to be thanking him for it!” _ _ _ _

____“You’re right. If it weren’t for Jon I never would have loved Lady, and Lady never would have died. Give me an address and I’ll set to it. Or is the Wall what we’re going with, still?”_ _ _ _

____“He is at the Wall.”_ _ _ _

____“But he could be anywhere.”_ _ _ _

____“Yes, he could, but he’s at the Wall. Because that’s where Bran asked him to be.”_ _ _ _

____“Since when has the bastard ever listened to -”_ _ _ _

____Then her cheek is stinging, and her sister is a wildcat._ _ _ _

____“Don’t you ever call Jon Snow a bastard, Sansa, I’d have died without my Needle!”_ _ _ _

____“You’d have died,” She says, to be cruel, or to be kind, “If you couldn’t run. I’ve seen the way you sew.”_ _ _ _

____“Fine,” Says Arya, “Fine.”_ _ _ _

____“And about you getting married-”_ _ _ _

____“Gendry’s a bastard, too. Baratheon’s bastard. I love him.”_ _ _ _

____“You do that.”_ _ _ _

____“Fine.” Says Arya, “I will.”_ _ _ _

____She pokes her head through a minute later, too quickly to have left to begin with,_ _ _ _

____“Dinner’s at seven. Don’t be late.”_ _ _ _

____It is a tempting offer. Apart from the furs, there is too much here to look at, without losing yourself. Winterfell’s library may not be as vast as a Maester’s, but the pages in its books unfurl like trees; taking root deep in a permafrost conscience. In youth, their father let them choose on their birthing days one book of their choice to take with them; and her shelf is _Caps for Sale_ and _Wuthering Heights_ and _Alice in Wonderland_. Arya favored _The Jungle Book._ She doesn’t know what Bran read; paranormal activity books, probably. Sansa doesn’t look. Rickon was too young for the tradition, but there are books on his shelf anyway; Arya’s doing, she guesses. Sansa doesn’t look at these ones, either._ _ _ _

____Where they get interesting - the shelfs, that is, not the books she’s read a thousand times - are the grooves cut methodically behind each seventh book. _A good strong prime_ , her father’d said, _Seven._ The name of mother’s gods, too, she’s not forgot. Pressing there, in those spaces, leads to the walls groaning with the releasing of their hinges, and the paths that wind the crypts. _ _ _ _

____The crypts of Winterfell are - Well. They seem a place that Bran would like, and, most nights, she’s content to leave it at that. But she does come down here; she does try, when she can, or did. Then to see her family, and now to see the lies. She likes to trace the statues and the swords that they hold, which turned into knives, which turned into guns and which, as per the Revival, turned again into swords. She takes the hand of Aunt Lyanna’s statue; or what she can hold of it, and ponders once more on the strange occurence of Aegon, heir to the throne, who scant years earlier had been known to her as her bastard brother, son of her father and a woman who would not be named. She had been cruel to Jon growing up, always blaming him for getting more than her. Arya said it was ah, oh, it was a ’symptom of resentment towards the patriarchy’, but Sansa chalks it up to jealousy. Jon, as a child, had gotten everything he wanted. He got to go the Wall, for Mother’s sake! Arya pointed out, when she voiced it, that Sansa _hadn’t_ wanted to go to the Wall, and had in fact wanted to go marry the worst man she could choose, but the sentiment remained. Jon, out of all of them, was free. Free from the Stark duties, the Stark holdings, and, yes, the Stark name. _ _ _ _

____Jon, if he wanted, could leave them._ _ _ _

____Well. Could have. It was still stupid of him, she thought, to have killed Danearys the way he did. He should’ve known it wouldn’t get him anywhere except exiled. That was alright, she thought - there were worse things in this world than exile. The problem was in getting exiled right when you’re about to be free. Arya can argue that he was good at the wall, but in Sansa’s opinion, it was a waste of his freedom either way, and bloody Jon gave in to it! Gods, but if anyone had tried to tell _her_ that she couldn’t go back north if she wanted to- _Again,_ says Arya, _you didn’t_ \- her father would’ve turned inside his grave.  
Arya still can’t cook. This is what she finds at seven, before they praise the Seven, which Arya retains to be a “bullshit custom”. _ _ _ _

____“They were mother’s gods,” She says._ _ _ _

____“Whatever.” Says Arya._ _ _ _

____She might understand if Arya prayed to the old gods. She prays to the old gods, too, not only the Seven. But no,_ _ _ _

____“I don’t pray,” Arya says, “Because I’m not stupid.”_ _ _ _

____“In other words,” She settles for, sipping on her water, “You don’t pray because you’ve killed too many men to go to heaven.”_ _ _ _

____“None of that. Not in _my_ house.” _ _ _ _

____Warrior, she’d forgotten how stubborn Arya could be._ _ _ _

____“Firstly, I’m older. Secondly-”_ _ _ _

____“I wasn’t going to let you rot in fucking Winterfell until you died.”_ _ _ _

____“I’d not have rotted.”_ _ _ _

____“You would too have. And I, as your sister, who knows you don’t take care of yourself -"_ _ _ _

____“I take care of myself fine, Arya-”_ _ _ _

____“Two words. Joffrey. Baratheon.”_ _ _ _

____“And you know it.”_ _ _ _

____“Father,” Arya says, “Wouldn’t want you to rot in Winterfell for the rest of your life. Not if he thought you could have one. It isn’t too late for you, Sansa. You could have anyone you wanted. Children and everything. You could have the house, if you wanted, too. I mean, you could take it from me. Can. If you want. Bran and Robb and Rickon can’t. Jon can’t, and he’s still alive. There’s only you and me, Sansa, and I- Bloody hell, I hate it when you’re stubborn.”_ _ _ _

____“Oh.” She says, and another sip of water, another eyebrow raised, “I’m the stubborn one? _'Come to the house, Sansa. I’ll buy your plane tickets. I’ll send Gendry to harass you until you come. Please come home, sweet sister._ '"_ _ _ _

____“I wanted to see you.”_ _ _ _

____“‘Sweet sister?’”_ _ _ _

____“It worked, didn’t it?”_ _ _ _

____They are, then, laughing. She had missed Arya. Missed her. Would always miss her, probably, and not just because they were sisters. That was just the kind of woman Arya was. You couldn’t help but miss her, even when she made you fearsome mad. In truth, Sansa couldn’t picture a life without her strong-willed sister. That - not the books or the rugs or the tiredness - is why she really came to Winterfell. That and her childhood bedroom. It had the softest furs in the whole house, and -_ _ _ _

____“We’ll share, tonight.”_ _ _ _

____“What about Gendry?”_ _ _ _

____“Fuck Gendry. He’s waited before, he’s used to it.”_ _ _ _

____“Arya -"_ _ _ _

____“You’re my _sister_ , and I haven’t seen you in _months_. We’re sharing a fucking bedroom. You’ll be okay with the fire on?” _ _ _ _

____“Why wouldn’t I be?”_ _ _ _

____“I don’t know.” Says Arya, softer, then, “I don’t know the - details. It’s not exactly like you’ve talked to me about it. Gendry said that I should ask.”_ _ _ _

____“What is it with him, anyways?”_ _ _ _

____“Who, Gendry?”_ _ _ _

____“I was thinking ‘romance’ in general-” Arya flips her the bird, “But yes. Gendry.”_ _ _ _

____“We met during the war,” Says Arya, shrugging, “We liked each other well enough.”_ _ _ _

____“More than well enough, it looks.”_ _ _ _

____Arya blushes, a deep shade of red. It is… extremely encouraging._ _ _ _

____“You could say that.”_ _ _ _

____“And you’re sure he won’t mind? Us - Sharing?”_ _ _ _

____“He wants me to be happy.”_ _ _ _

____“Well.” Sansa says. Her mind is reeling. She doesn’t know what to do with the information. That Arya found someone like that - when Arya maintained she wasn’t interested in boys, in being looked after - that Arya pursued that relationship. That she can’t fathom why he would have such a notion, as wanting her happy. “Good.”_ _ _ _

____“Damn straight it is. And you haven’t even heard about the sex yet-”_ _ _ _

____“I’ll survive.”_ _ _ _

____“Oh, we have all night. If you’re ruining my chances of fucking my boyfriend, you’re damn well going to hear about it.”_ _ _ _

____Yes, thinks Sansa, stirring her glass in hand idly, it’s going to be a long, long night._ _ _ _

______ _ _

* 

The invitation comes out of nowhere, and it comes - yes, he checked twice - in the name of the Lady of Winterfell. A title he gathers is mostly superflous, yet has the startling ability to make him fall out of his bar seat. Backwards. Actually, it was the wedding part that did that, or, as Bronn helpfully inserts,

“Arya Stark is getting _married?_ Who’s going to die?”

Sandor packs his necessities - on the grounds that Bronn wants to go as his plus one to the North - and books them a cabin on a train.  
“You should change it,” Tormund suggests, “We were raised on the same milk, Clegane. You’ll hit your tiny head.” 

“Fuck off.” 

Bronn, naturally, packs everything with gold leaf he can find and prays - prays! - That the gods will find him a lady to impress. Specifically, one. 

“What’s the deal with her, anyways? This Margaery? She a good piece of -” 

“She’s Loras Tyrell’s sister. Also, we’re… friends.” 

It placates him, enough. 

Enough to bite his tongue from saying that they’re only doing it to be ‘official’, that knowing Stark they’ve been whatever marreied is in the North for months now, and to avoid the awkward potential of Bronn being consistently attracted to a woman for the first time in his life. (They are much alike that way.)  
He mentions it, anyways. 

“Didn’t know you had friends.” He says, as the closing bar casts them out. 

“Shut it, Hound.” 

“‘Hound’?” 

“I don’t ask you who you’re with, man, so don’t come around here asking me.” 

He only shrugs. 

“I’m never fucking anyone. Never fucking with anyone, either, you know that. That’s why you don’t ask.” 

“I don’t ask,” Says Bronn, “because you always act like a fucking jerk about it. _‘Oh, Bronn, I have scars, no one will love me'-_ ” 

Bronn is on the floor with a broken nose before he can so much as speak and there is a moment - the dreadful moment before he cries, that haunts him like a phantom, or a nightmare - when he thinks that the street is a mirror, and it’s showing Gregor’s face. And then the other man is holding him; pulling him close; tugging him tighter, and he forgets how to do anything but bay. 

“I’m sorry,” Bronn is saying, “I’m so, so, sorry, I shouldn’t have gone there. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” 

But he hadn’t needed to say it, nor does he need to ask, once the night is once more quiet, 

“Forgive me?” 

Bronn already knows. 

Or so it would go, in a perfect world, he thinks.

* 

“Why the _fuck_ are you planning my wedding?!”

“I don’t know, Arya, why are you having one?”

“Not so that you can get me into a dress.” 

“Noone can get you into a dress. You would kill them trying.” 

It is morning, and Arya is cooking her breakfast while she flips through the color chips. She brings a plate out when she’s finished. The eggs are overdone. She must have learned to cook from Cersei. 

“What do you think,” She asks, “About yellow?” 

“I hate it.” 

“Green? Also, fiance.” 

“Hate it. What about - ‘fiance’.” 

“Gendry. You called him your boyfriend, yesterday. If you’re getting married, then he’ll be your fiance.” 

“We are married, keep up. I want gray.”

“You are _not_ having a gray wedding. It’s gray enough outside.” 

“No,” Says Arya, resolutely, “Sorry, but it’s my wedding, and I want it gray like - like Sandor fucking Clegane’s eyes.” 

She tries to eat her eggs, then. They are rubbery; they wouldn’t decompose inside the landfill, and the air is filled with the terrible stench of the Blackwater; another summer barbecue. 

“How would you know?”

“Sansa.” 

“How would you know what color Sandor Clegane’s eyes are, Arya? How the _hell_ would you know about him?!” 

She breaks the plate, and ruins the eggs, but they couldn’t have been salvaged anyways. She sweeps it while Arya washes her face in the bathroom and brushes fresh tumbleweeds into her hair. 

“I don’t suppose,” She asks, the broom replaced, “You have any tea?” 

“Earl Gray?” 

She is glad, somehow, that the plate broke in the kitchen. If she were holding it now it would be broken again. 

“I went to the store before you got here. I know it’s hard for you, coming back, and I thought - I don’t know, I thought that knowing how much of a stubborn arse you can be you still wouldn’t want to drink coffee.” 

“Oh.” She says, and swallows. Slightly. “That’s -" 

“The nicest thing I’ve ever done for you?” 

“Oh, Arya, I wasn’t suggesting - anything like that, I - “ 

“Save it. I know that I was a shit sister to you, alright? I know that I ruined your dresses and ruined your perfect prince charming. But you - You were a shit sister too, you know.” 

She does. She can still see the butcher’s boy, Micah, shooting his wooden pistol. She can still see where the blood would have soaked him, hotter and redder and darker than the deepest rose-red lipstick. 

“You can make it up to me, though.” Says Arya, “If you want.”

“And how would I do that?” 

The space between them languishes. It is a legitimate question, borne from years of They’ve never got on, years of _Was I on her list?_ She’s a base, and Arya’s an acid, and they should cancel each other out but really they’re water and potassium. What could she possibly do to reconcile all of the pain that she’s caused? Arya, though, wears a sly grin. 

“Sansa.” She says, “Just plan my fucking wedding.”

* 

It’s a fair request.

Arya and Gendry are perfect for each other, but her sister doesn’t have any skin in the game here. Organized seating. Color schemes and centerpieces and catering arrangements. _Guest lists._ She can take pleasure in the fact that this, this planning, is hers to do as she pleases with. 

She does go with yellow, canary yellow, for the flowers, accented with tough, black-seed northern grasses. They’ll make a statement, set against the whitened tableclothes. She sets thin-stripes of bronze to run the rim of the invitations, whom she sends out to - 

To almost everyone they know, really. Anyone who Arya asks her to, and anyone who would object to the union, and everyone who’s left. She sends invitations to the Free Cities and Vaes Dothrak and the Night’s Watch and Braavos, where Syrio lived, because Arya wants someone from Braavos at her wedding. She sends an invitation to Tyrion; he deserves to see at least one Stark married happily, to somebody other than himself. She sends an invitation to Bran; he declines it. (She sends an invitation to Sandor Clegane. It was one of those things that she thought she had to do before you die. So she wrote his name on the envelope, said _fuck it_ , and left the rest to fate.) She books the venue, clears the menu, chooses placing for the tables, and orders alterations on Arya’s dress. She asks Sam and Gilly’s youngest to be the flower girl.

And then, out of nowhere, there is nothing left to do. 

“Bloody hells,” Says Arya, when the last of her energy is drained, along with that last glass of wine, “You’re efficient.” 

Arya isn’t. She’s pushed the wedding off for four and a half months. It’s nothing short of scandalous. If their mother were alive - But she isn’t, and they are, and Bran is, too, though it doesn’t make Arya cry. 

“He’s the Three Eyed Raven, I’m sure he’s above high society by now.”

“No,” She says, nursing the hangover that’s rapidly approaching her, “I think Bran’s just over the future.” 

“It could be that. Let it be, anyways, he’s not good company, anymore.” 

“It’s selfish. Mother would be rolling in her grave.” 

Arya snorts. 

“Not because of Bran.” 

It’s a fruitless exercise, what their mother would think of them now. She knows what her mother would think of them, now; she would think that they’re Starks, for good or for ill. She would also personally disown each and every one of them, except the ones that died. She would be proud of Bran, for staying low and keeping his mouth shut and not giving in to the pressures of what anyone else would call a normal life. What does normal mean, anyways? It could mean Arya, fighting and killing and falling in love, or her, with her - Sansa-ness. What does it mean to be normal, anyways? What does it mean to be her? 

“Are you having a mid-life crisis?” 

“I don’t have mid-life crises, Arya. I’m not mid-life.” 

“Whatever you say.” 

Which meant, and not wrongly, that the war had aged them all a million years. 

“All I’m saying is, is that you look like you’re having a mid-life crisis, and if you’re having a mid-life crisis, you need to drink twice as much wine as you have and tell me about it.”

“Why would I tell you about it?” 

“Because I’m your sister and I’m about to get married and I want to bask in the fact that I’m not the only one who feels like they’re going to combust from the sheer effort of existing.” 

“Thorough reasoning.”

“Isn’t it just?” 

“You’re a pill.” 

“I want to hear, Sansa, tell me. Have you - Did you have a one night stand or something?” 

“Arya. I haven’t left the house since I got here.” 

“Well, you could’ve had someone over.” 

“Arya.”

“I’m a heavy sleeper. And knowing you, he would be a quiet lay, unless - you’re not into like, bondage or anything, right? Because I do not want to think about that-” 

“ _Arya._ I didn’t have anyone over. I’m not having a mid-life crisis, I’m just - tired.” 

“You’re done with everything.” 

“Yes. That’s why I’m tired.” 

“And you don’t even have to get married."

Arya laughs, but she isn’t laughing. What would her mother think of her now? She would think that she had wasted her opportunities, that she paid too high a price for survival. Survived as a necessity, at the expense of her joy and her prospects and that thing that girls call love. _For someone that’s fallen in love_ , her mother would say, _You’ve done precious little to ease it._

What her mother would think about her holds no real value. It’s not something that can be traded for silk-cloth or bartered for bread. It can’t bring her back from the dead. The only thing that it can do, she’s found, is find a way even on the good days to make her feel like shit. Surprisingly, in this aftermath, there is still time for that. It creeps up on her everytime she deigns to think about her mother, and how her mother died, and how the bastards paid for it. She’ll start out remembering the way that they sat at the sink in the bathroom, the feeling of hands in her hair; and the beat of the strands as the braiding was done, the somber, girlish words they would exchange. 

Morning was their mother’s favorite time of day; it was when she had birthed each of her beautiful children, and when she sang hymnals at church; and so it was when, as she braided Sansa’s hair, she gave her daughter all the life advice that she had wanted, when she herself had been a girl. _Don’t give yourself away to men,_ her mother had said, _Unless you can be sure that they would do the same. Do not give yourself away to men if they would cast dishonor upon your family; they are all that we have in this life. And do not do your family wrong. We cannot choose them, but it makes us no less theirs._

__As she grew older, the braiding stopped and started up again, in smaller hands that could not see what wasn’t in the mirror, and the giving and the taking turned to lurking in doorways, to auburn-haired judgement and lukewarm, drunk confessions. _I knew a man named Petyr_ , her mother said, King’s Landing far on the horizon, _Who wanted to take my virginity. But he loved me in a way that was not holy, and he would have had me before my time, so I went with your father instead.__ _

____She never thought to ask her mother why she thought this was something that she would want to hear; it was simply what she did, and because she was her mother, Sansa chose to believe that she thought it would help her, somehow, when she reached the final destination; that she had known, even then, that she wouldn’t be there to see it herself._ _ _ _

____That was where the memories went south like they had, went sour. How her mother would 'tsk' and 'tut' and shake her head, disappointment and resentment warring in her eyes like the armies. How her mother would think of all the dreams that she’d for her daughter; the dreams of her being just like herself, and living just like she had, except happier. How they had been squandered, like so many other children’s dreams. She would mourn for the grandchildren that she didn’t have. And then relief would sweep her as she remembered that her mother would do none of those things, because her mother was a gravestone in a sea of gravestones, a gravestone that she hadn’t visited that didn’t have a name, and that her father’s dead-coin eyes would never see her face again. It made her sick._ _ _ _

____In the mornings, sometimes, it made her so sick that she heaved at the toilet for hours, and came out to see that the time had passed too soon. Nothing could be done for it. Like everything it was a constant sickness that tasted of milk too long in the fridge. She had betrayed her mother, and the woman couldn’t even defend herself. Gods, she ought to be tried for treason._ _ _ _

____Every once in awhile, she tried to talk to her._ _ _ _

____She would stand there, in the bathroom, and see a different pair of blue eyes, a different storm of auburn curls. She would tell her mother the truth, for there wasn’t any use in lying. Things she hadn’t told herself, she told her mother. And the sickness was her shadow, even when there wasn’t sun. She told her mother that she would do better, for the same reason that everyone told their mother they’d do better._ _ _ _

____Just because her mother wouldn’t choose her, it didn’t make her any less hers._ _ _ _

______ _ _

* 

He knows very little about himself, anymore, but he knows that he’s not supposed to be seriously considering going to Arya Stark’s wedding, however much it is one. The first thought that he had, upon receiving his invitation, was that he knew the little bird that bore that handwriting, and the second was that nothing would make him happier than seeing the wolf of Winterfell’s face when she saw him, scars and cane and all. The cane had been Bronn’s idea from the beginning and from the beginning he had loathed it; Bronn, of all people, thinking that he couldn’t overcome his own struggles. _I don’t want you to fucking fall in the street and get pissed on,_ said Bronn, _But if that’s what you want, then fuck it, get on with it._ It was one of their rare, honest fights that ended with Bronn saying, sans expletives, that he just wanted him to be okay. So he had said okay. And he had to admit, when he received the invitation, he had felt the burn and the fever that the wound had once been, had nearly screamed from it. If he couldn’t spite the wolf-girl with his actions, at least he could spite her with his life.

Both of them. 

It doesn’t change the fact that he was Joffrey fucking Lannister’s lapdog. _There’s only one thing that can change that_ , Bronn says, _And that’s you._ Screw Bronn, though. When has he ever needed Bronn? He found out, though, yesterday, that Tormund is going - on account of the ‘giant lady’ - and that half the damned Night’s Watch will be there, to, among other things, give briefings on whether there will be a Wall again. And damn if the Starks are there but he’s been waiting, he has, on knowing that. The Wall might be the only hope for him when all is through. There are war crimes to answer for - he knows they will try him, even if they haven’t yet - and the Wall, if there was one, could be his salvation. Sure, there’d not be any women, any children, in the cards for him, but he never had those anyway. One of the things you learn in the war, he’s found, is that you find out who you really are; and who he really is is someone who wants to live, come hell or high water. 

Mayhaps it’s selfish of him, but he’s sure he’s that, too. 

Selfish. Isn’t that why he’s doing this Thinking long and hard over this? Because he’s selfish, and he wants to - 

He’ll go, he thinks one minute, and the second that he won’t. He’ll go, he will think, and eavesdrop where he can, see if they might need him there, and he’ll make that girl watch what became of the man that she killed. He won’t go, he will think, because it would kill him deader than she had. It gets him no closer to making a decision. 

The upshot being that, when Bronn calls him and asks him to yet _another_ session of ‘drinking-with-your-mates’ - a word he is sure he only uses because he knows Sandor’s feeling on ‘friends’ - and ‘talking-things-through’, he slips on the first jacket he can find that’s a size too small and staggers into the noon-day rain. What is it, he thinks, with this city and all it’s raining? It makes him furious, for some reason. It soaks his hair flat on his head, barely covering his scars. 

It’s wet. 

Bronn has a seat at the back, a _How I Met Your Mother_ four top. He is there by himself. 

“What happened to Tormund?” 

“I didn’t invite him. We’re having ourselves a boys night.” 

“Aye - Sorry, the fuck?” 

“A boys night, before the wedding? I know why I’m going, and it’s not for the Arya Stark, she’s not my type.” 

“Who are you there for, then?” 

“Margaery? You remember Margaery? Blonde bombshell, ass for _days-_ " 

“Aye, I remember her.” 

“And you-”

“Don’t.” 

“Are going for a Stark. So go fucking get her!” 

“Go there.” 

Bronn’s laugh is raucous.

“I mean it. You’ve been single for too fucking long, you might die.” 

“I haven’t ever been - “ A cough, “What anyone in their right mind would consider-”

“Taken?”

“That.” 

“You need to, though.” 

“Do I?” 

“Everyone does. What, you think you’re any different from any other motherfucker who’s going to this thing? Speaking as a sellsword-”

“Who’s never held a sword in his life-”

“The world is better when you have a woman in it.” 

“What, just ‘a’ woman? I can buy a fucking woman if I want to.” 

“You could,” Says Bronn, “But you won’t.”

He looks at his drink like it’s Sansa fucking Stark. That’s what this is about. Sansa fucking Stark, and whether or not he wants her in his bed. It’s not a question. It’s never been a question. But for the sake of hating this bloody day enough by now, he wishes that Bronn could at least pretend he doesn’t need to acknowledge it. She’s so far out of his league, she exists in an entirely different universe. The boys fall over her, with their golden hair and their green eyes and their ridiculously form-fitting skinny jeans. What chance in hell does he have with Sansa fucking Stark?

“Speaking as a swellsword,” Bronn continues, “I think that you need to get laid.” 

He looks at his drink.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

* 

“Jesus fucking Christ. You really _are_ having a mid-life crisis.”

She almost wishes that Arya were wrong about it. Why is it that Arya, the least mannered member of their family, got so good at reading people? 

“I’m fine.” 

This has become the constant refrain of the last few weeks. She is, anyways. Fine. Whether Arya chooses to see it or not. 

“I’m getting married tomorrow.” Says Arya, after a questionable silence. 

“You are.” She says, and it hits her, with all the force of a nuclear bomb, “You are! Oh my _God!_ ” 

“Mom would lose her shit!” 

“Gendry is going to lose his shit, Arya! You’re going to be beautiful!” Arya looks at her, incredulously, “Well that’s the point, isn’t it? You’re getting married and you’re going to be beautiful and -” 

“And you’re still single.” 

It feels like coming down from a high but it happens when you’re not asleep, so you can feel the giddy giggles leave you, can feel yourself crash through the atmosphere, and it burns everything sparkling away.

“Don’t cry about it or anything. You’ll look beautiful, too.”

She will, or so Arya assures her. She’s best woman, so she’ll have to give a speech, but it’s not that much to ask, and it’s not like there was anyone else who her sister could’ve asked. She’s the last surviving member of their family except for Bran. And the dress really is beautiful. It suits her better than it did, since Arya asked for the colors to be changed - _a week before the bloody wedding, Arya, I’m going to kill you_ \- in what was likely a bid for more time. She decides to be honest.

“I don’t want a man.” 

“Nobody wants a man,” Says Arya, “Until they want a man.” 

“And then?”

“Then? Then they just want to fuck.”

“That’s easy, then. I don’t want to fuck. And I don’t want a man, I-”

“You’re trying to get your life back together. Which like, it’s nice and all, but live a little! Why do you think I’m getting married?”

“Because you’re in love?” 

“Screw love. I want someone to hold me down. It’s like, twice as easy to function when you don’t have to wash the dishes. So what if you had issues with men in the past? The past doesn’t matter anymore.”

She’s wrong, Arya is wrong, it’s the only thing that matters. But maybe, she thinks, maybe for one day she can let Arya be right. When they were growing up, it was like that, too. Perfect princess Sansa, and Arya the daddy’s girl, the rude one who didn’t want to be a lady. She wanted to be a lady so badly that she let Lady die, and it didn’t make a whit of difference. And they took everything she had, and left her, lying in the road. But she knows she’ll never let a man touch her, again, she won’t ever let a man call her pretty, again; it’s the _only_ thing that matters. 

“Tyrion is coming,” She says, “I want to tell him I’m sorry. That’s the only man I’ll be talking to. It’s about you, tomorrow.” 

“Yeah,” Says Arya, “It is, isn’t it? It is! Should we get drunk tonight? We could go to a strip club!” 

“Oh my god, Arya, no. Gendry would never forgive you.”

“Gendry would like it.” 

“I can’t believe you.” 

“He would. He doesn’t mind shit like that.” She glances around the room, as if afraid of being intercepted, “It makes him horny.” 

“Doesn’t everything make men horny?”

“Yeah,” Says Arya, “When it has to do with you. Seriously, either help me get drunk, right now, or help yourself get laid tomorrow.” 

And maybe she stays quiet too long, takes too long a moment to formulate a response. It would be witty, sarcastic, and she wouldn’t let her voice shake when she gave it; because Arya’s hand is on her wrist, and their fingers fit like they were always sisters. 

“Sansa,” She asks, sounding more like their mother now than she ever did as a child, “Are you _alright?_ ” 

“I’m fine,” She says, “I’m fine.” 

It isn’t what she’s asking, but it’s more than she ever thought that she could give, and later, as they lie in bed, feet by head and head by feet, when the lamplight is dimmed and she remembers this other thing their mother said; When you do give yourself to a man, make sure that he will be a good man to you, and she thinks that Arya’s figured it out, she says, to noone and everyone and by the Seven, 

“Sandor’s coming, too.”

* 

So here he is. The night before the blasted wedding that he wasn’t going to go to. Until Bronn told him he had to. He’s lying on a blanket made out of patchwork; and he remembers this blanket. Eleanor made him this blanket, out of the scraps of stolen blankets, to sleep with while she nursed him through his wounds. She sewed it by the firelight, and he winced from it, kept his eyes closed, the heat radiating painfully throughout the small cabin. What he would give now to go back, to watch her as she worked. To say that he had one more memory of his sister than he actually did.

She was the kind of girl who deserved to get married, not Arya fucking Stark. 

Gods, why does he think such things as that? She had the soul of a fighter, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t a lovely girl - Or was that the other one, the one that he - and it didn’t mean that she oughtn’t to be happy. Anyone who survived damn well deserves that. Bronn would tell him to be fine with his feelings - _Say fuck her if you want to say fuck her_ \- but in his opinion? Life took away a lot of shit from him, but he won’t let it take away his basic human decency. 

He packed light for this, because he knew he wouldn’t stay. He booked one night at a cheap hotel on the outskirts of town, the kind that has free internet but makes you fend for yourself for breakfast. The television blares Fox News; he doesn’t have the strength to get out of bed and change it, so he listens to Hannity, and takes solace in the fact that there exists in the world a human being who’s been drunker than him. Tonight he’s talking about whoever the fuck stole Betsy DeVoss’s yacht, and it’s an old story, but the words are drowned out anyway. By thoughts. Thoughts of 

_She rode in in an old 90’s beetle. They were popular in the South. It was the color of limes, but she much preferred lemons. It was some type of save-face mission - The Starks, northern political geniuses, would come down from Alaska and fix all the president’s fuck-ups; their children would solidify the ruptured country by having their oldest daughter marry into political royalty - and it never would have worked. The Lannisters could barely function; they could barely get a budget approved. Joffrey came around to open the car door for her, and she was a blur of red and blue and nervous. From the minute she saw him, Joffrey Lannister owned her. She didn’t spare a glance for the soldier turned PR mastermind that he called a Hound._

__what awaited him at the service. At the reception that would follow, where he would be expected to - Gods, to talk to people. He knew what he would say to her, when they saw each other. He would ask her what kept her alive, and she would tell him, Well, you see, I sold my body to a madman, and let another madman be my father. Oh, he’d heard the rumors; they blew on the breeze like the cold fronts that swept the countryside. He heard she’d been broken in, broken in rough, no thanks to him. He would ask her, tomorrow, if it was true. And then he would return to his life; a life without weddings. A life without Sansa. A life without anything worth living for at all._ _

____

* 

The sun rises, and she wakes.

* 

The sun rises, and he wakes.

Bronn’s number is playing, inside his head, the ‘one’s and the ‘zero’s; the ‘three’s. Bronn’s words, running like a Walkman recording. _So go fucking get her_. Is that what she said to Arya, when she woke up? Because she would be awake; early, earlier than the sun, busying herself at the tables, dusting up the dust that isn’t there. Setting out the placemates. There’s a rented car at the front of the hotel - _I’m not going to make you walk on that leg._ The windows are tinted darkly. 

Bronn is sitting in the backseat with an Egg McMuffin in his hand. 

“I got you one. You slept?” 

“Aye.” He says, taking his McMuffin, and biting. It tastes like the first Egg McMuffin that he ever had. He wishes that they seasoned it.

“You ready for this?”

“What is there to be ready for?” 

Bronn clucks at him like a mother hen. 

“You’re forgetting-” 

“I’m not forgetting anything. I just want it over with.” 

“Okay.” Says Bronn, “Alright.” 

It’s been twelve minutes of silence when the car pulls up to the church. He stumbles a bit on the edge of it, trying to get out, and lurches for his cane; he brought it, even though he didn’t want to, because Bronn said it would help him with the dancing. Not like dancing is on his agenda. 

“I could’ve walked it,” He says, as they wander into the hall, “I could’ve walked it.” 

“I think you just proved that you couldn’t,” Says Bronn, obviously remembering the car. It’s true; it’s shaken him. He feels quite unsteady, and desperately wishes for water. His fingers twitch on the head of his cane. Bronn must see it, for as the next guest passes with a less-than-subtle stare (Yara Greyjoy, of all people), he whispers low. 

“Should we sit?” 

When the war was over, during that cursed period between the end of it and the reinstating of the norms, he had learnt to rely on his cane. Before it was his cane it was his crutches, and before it was his crutches, it was his wheelchair. He hated to be weak - how could he be weak, the man who had beaten the Mountain? - but Bronn reminded him, every chance he got, that it was alright to ask for help when he needed it. He couldn’t always go fast, but he could ask the world to slow down, if it moved so quick as to blur, and he did it now; exhausted in body and mind. 

“Aye. That would be kindred.” 

Bronn nodded.

“Let’s go sit, then. Fuck, she filled out, didn’t she?”

“Yara?” He asks, grateful for the distratction, “I didn’t know her well.”

They sit near a wall in the back, so that he can lean his cane up on the wall. A pretty girl sits next to him; at any rate, a girl that Bronn would find pretty, though to him she resembles wet toast; so that he is sandwiched between Bronn, who wanted him to have - fucking hell - a lap to fall on if he falls, and the wet toast girl, when Arya walks herself up the aisle. _Her father died_ , wet toast whispers to him, conspiratorially, and with a distressing twinkle in her eyes, as if he hadn’t known. She looks - lovely. Both of them look - lovely. 

Sansa’s wearing green. 

He wants to get his cane. He wants to get his cane and walk the fuck out of this building before she sees him. 

He doesn’t. 

And they - Arya and Gendry - have their vows, which _don’t_ make him cry, because he’s a Clegane for gods sake, even if he did travel with her for long enough to know that she has a good, fierce heart. He admits it to himself even as he remembers goading her, begging her for a quick death which she refused to give; she has a good, kind heart. His fists tighten knowingly in rage; twitching with the yearning to make flesh fold like origami. His arm raises of its own accord, not stopping until something cool is nested underneath it. It is the head of his cane, an elaborately carved Hound that Joffrey somehow thought was funny, and with which he would beat him, whensoever it struck his fancy, in those early, early days. It is Bronn, he thinks, with a sigh of cool relief, Bronn, saving him again. 

Yet when he turns to thank him, and perhaps to voice some of the emotions the bloody wedding’s drudged up - _I wouldn’t be alive without you, and I’ve never yet thanked you for that_ \- a false image confronts him. 

“Hello,” Says Sansa Stark. A thinner, more ragged Sansa Stark who wrests a barking laugh from his scratchy throat. She looks like he remembered her being, in the nightmares he had for her future, and he cannot stand her presence, so he growls, 

“Aren’t you supposed to be giving a speech?” 

She shrugs, noncommitedly. 

“I was,” She said, “But Arya said Jon can handle it - he’s best man.” 

He tries a second time. 

“Why the fuck did you give me my cane?” 

She shrugs, noncommitedly. He can see all the years on her face, clear as his scars. 

“You looked like you wanted to kill someone. I thought that a weapon might help.” 

“You thought that would help, did you?” 

“In my experience, it does.” 

He can’t resist it, then - a wave of coyote howling, washing through him like the current of a river, and Sansa joins with him; joins her laughter in a harmony sweeter than love. In his head he’s seeing double - Sansa, leant against the back of the Lannister’s courtyard, smoking a cigarette and coughing, the ashes blowing sideways, and this Sansa here, her cheekbones cold and wane from lack of sleep, or hunger. The laughter stretches her muscles in a way that makes her wince; as if she has not laughed in ages, and her eyes that once shied from the carnage of his visage linger. 

“Sandor,” She says, when she catches her breath, “Why did you - Why did you come to my sister’s wedding?” 

She is laughing when she says it, as if a dam has broken inside of her, and he slams his cane on the floor; a gavel to snap her from her daydreams. 

“Why d'you think, little bird? I got an invitation.” 

“I know,” She says, drawing her lips inside her mouth with those pretty little pearls, the remnant of a chuckle whistling outwards. “I made the guest list.” 

He doesn’t know what to say to this. 

Bronn would know. 

Bronn isn’t here. 

“Bathroom.” She says, “With Margaery Tyrell. Looks like it’s just you and me, Clegane.”

 _You and me,_ he thinks, _Just you and me._

“Kind of him.” He settles for, eventually, as Jon launches into a speech that he should be giving to the Watch, the kind of rebel-rousing drivel that would have served well for the men that fought the dead. Himself included. 

“He was Arya’s oldest friend,” She starts, and as he bobs beneath the waves of her lilting Northern slur, he breathes the weary seed of drunkness. “He gave her a handgun at Winterfell, before our Lord and Savior Robert called us South. Did you know that, Sandor? Our father got her shooting lessons.” 

He hadn’t known it, but it doesn’t surprise him. He voices it; it rings in the hall like crystal, but nobody hears. There are a million other crystals, ringing here. 

“She learned from Syrio Forrel,” She said, “He was a sniper from Braavos. You may remember him.” 

“We were - I knew of him.” 

“Mm. He was a good teacher. He taught her to be - swift as a cat, still as a shadow. Something like that. But he was - he was a good teacher,” And yes, she is tipsy, hiccups lazing in the space between her words, “She learned how to shoot.” 

She learned how to shoot, he thinks to himself, She learned how to shoot and 

“She didn’t shoot me.” 

“No?” She darts a glimpse of leg.

“I fevered.” 

“Ah.” She says, “A different kind of pain.” 

“How the bloody hell would you know, girl?!” 

His anger has gotten the best of him, and he’s stood, so swiftly that he may as well have tumbled over. At his full height, he looms above her, a dark cloud hanging in an amber sky, his teeth bared and dripping. She doesn’t look afraid. She doesn’t look anything except over her shoulder, to contemplate matters with which he isn’t privy, until the peak of his fury is surmounted and drains from him; leaving him, exhausted, to drop back into his chair. 

“My brother Bran fevered as a child,” She says, then, her words unimpeded by his tantrum. “He fevered so when he was young that my mother prayed to the Seven to heal him.” 

“Did he?”

“I wouldn’t know. Only the Seven knows what the Seven knows. And only if you believe in them.” 

“Do you?” 

She shakes her head, vehemently.

“If they was real,” She starts, stumbling into those rare moments of drunken clarity that cut as sharply as a knife, “Then none of us would have suffered like we have. I mean - Look around you. What is there left?” 

“The North,” He says, because he thinks it will please her, and she answers, as he says it, 

“Love, I suppose.” 

“Love.” 

“Arya isn’t marrying for convenience.” 

“What, then?” 

“Appearances.” She bites it out, fast and icy. “She wants to keep her appearances up.” 

He would laugh at that, if it weren’t so utterly wrong. 

“She’s Arya.” He says, feeling every bit as dumb as he sounds. 

“She’s changed,” Says Sansa, “Haven’t we all?”  
Her eyelids droop, and he worries fleetingly that she will feint on him, a dead weight in his arms that he couldn’t carry alone. Then her cheeks regain the blush of the wine, and her fingers begin to tap out a rhythm on his thigh, and he thinks, for the sparest, slowest, most muddled of instants, that everything’s right with the world.

“I have to give my speech soon,” She says, her head tucking into the joint of his neck, her wrists creeping like spiders up his arms. 

“You’re drunk off your arse.” 

“‘Can still talk.” She mutters, half to the air, and half to his formal blazer, “For Arya.” 

“Go, then.” 

He means it to be teasing, but she recoils as if he has wounded her, and his fingers twitch now out of a desperation to draw her back to him as she stands, wobbling on her feet like an ungainly fool, to go greet the audience. 

“Hello!” She says, as polite as she was as a child, “My name is Sansa Stark, though - I’m sure you all knew that, seeing as - We’re survivors. That’s what this speech is about, I think - that we’re survivors. I shouldn’t be saying that, should I, at my sister’s wedding? But it’s true. I mean, in the strict, literal sense of the word, it’s true - look at us! We’re living, we’re breathing, we’ve survived! But also in the sense of - You could say, in the sense that the war rolled through the Northern mountains and razed the compass rose, and tested us all terribly. We’ve all faced many terrors. Why, nearly anyone in this room with us fought the Night King at Winterfell, and has seen the face of death itself. Nearly all of us have lost, somehow or another, our families. Apart from myself, and Jon, and Brandon, I’m all that my sister has left. Many of us have lost our homes, our selves, our sanity; and all of us have lost our world. The world, as we knew it, can never be regained. But we have all of us survived these trials, and done the best we can, and made the most of our lives that can be made, here, in the aftermath, so that our children might know what men spoke of when they said that women smiled sunlight. 

“My sister, Arya, she truly does smile sunlight. If you haven’t seen her smile, you wouldn’t know what I mean, but if you have, then you know that it’s what follows the rainbow that breaks in the wake of a gale. She’s as wild as the sun, too, as harsh and stubborn and unyielding as the sun’s flames, when she deems it necessary to protect the ones she cares for. And my sister - Arya - once she decides that you’re one of those people? She would lay down her life and all the lives in Westeros to keep you safe. Our dear departed mother used to say she was too - oh, what’s the word? I fear it has escaped me, so I will leave it at this: There were some parts of the North that our mother never understood. Arya was one of them. 

“And now Arya - yes, my sister Arya - is getting married. I’m sorry to say, I don’t know Gendry Waters very well, but I know my sister, and I know that she would never marry, never cleave herself to someone, for anything but love. I know that she would never submit to a man who had hurt her, regardless of what forgiveness he sought. If a man hurt my sister, that man would be dead. So I know that though I have not gone through Arya’s trials, and have not lived the same life she has, and that the air we have tasted hasn’t tasted the same, that Arya is going to be very happy, now. 

“There’s nothing in life like loving, and there’s nothing in life, not like being loved. Arya has that now. And because I also know, as sure as I know myself, that Arya would not have here anyone who wasn’t a part of her family, I can say with surety that we have it, too. I could say a million sweet things about my sister; I could sing her praises from the soil to the sky; but in reality, all that need be said is this: Arya Waters is the bravest, kindest woman that I have ever known. I hope you all will let her love suffuse you as this night she has been suffused. Th - Thank you.” 

She ends it nervously, with a startled curtsy. Her silence hangs too loud. Her words had hung too loud. It was like she’d run out of things to say before she’d even started, and instead had heaved up a miasma of disembodied emotions; pitiful, struggling creatures that wept for a shape to call theirs. It had wrung her out, too; she was crying as she blindly grappled for the skirt of her dress. He could see now that the candles in the aisles had been lit that the fabric was but dull emerald; that her hair hung limp and brittle; that dark shadows flickered underneath lax eyes and too-pale skin wrapped a too-thin framework; she was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. 

The church exploded into the clockwork motions of Gendry, lunging to catch a toppeling Sansa from knocking over the candle by the podium, and Arya rushing to the acolytes’ room to clear a table. His limping kept the time. 

“What do you need?” He asked, when Sansa was deposited, and he stopped, then. “I - Congratulations. On the - What do you need me to do?”

The she-wolf glared at him. I want to fuck her bloody, he had said, and doubtless, she had not forgotten. Her mouth is a sliver of venom, her nostrils are Voldemort slits; and she tells him, 

“Stay with her. Just - stay with her.” 

“She’ll wake up,” Says Gendry, when Arya has left for the toilets - will she send Bronn to them? - “She always wakes up.” 

He stays with her until he catches a flash of light in the darkness; lost in the memories of the times that she didn’t; her soul a koi-fish aura, shimmering and bright.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Sandor and Sansa begin to find their peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second part of an AU in which I, being foolhardy, have attempted to convert the entire GoT canon into a modern setting. Events from canon form the basis of this world - but so does the modern world in which it takes place. That world factors into the stories and lives of my characters as much as the book and television canon, and at times may even do so more. Hopefully, this explanation will eliminate some confusion about what’s going on within this story! If not, feel free to ask any questions you may have in the comments below, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can! 
> 
> (Note: I am not counting season 8’s conclusion as canon for this work, because I think at this point we all know that literally nobody wants that. Not Bran bashing - just telling it like it is.) 
> 
> Some things to keep in mind about this chapter: 
> 
> **-** This is a dark, angsty story. There will be dark, angsty parts. Be warned in advance. 
> 
> **-** As I am wont to do, I have had some influences while writing this fic. They will be listed in the notes at the end of this chapter, for those of you who don't watch _Queer Eye_ or listen to by-this-point-mainstream indie bands.

Sunday. Bran. 

He asks her, straight away, how she’s doing, and straight away launches into a story of his own; about the woman he’s dating, Meera, and her brother, who he probably also wants to fuck.

“Have intercourse, Sansa,” He says, “Don’t forget your manners.” 

The resteraunt is busy, as it always is on Sundays, when all the cities athiests flock to the doors for a taste of their dead father’s blood, as permanent a fixture as the Albanian pop that’s playing on the radio, or the radiation at Pripyat. _Not to be too forward, little bird,_ Sandor had said, when he found out her plans, _but you need to stop going out to the places where your parents died._ He was welcome to tell Bran that, if he wanted. She would’ve, if she hadn’t known that it was futile. 

“Noone gives a fuck about my manners, Bran. Also,” She punctuates this next with a forkful of pasta reminiscent of a stab, “Nobody gives a _fuck_ about Jojen.”

“You wound me.”

“Whatever.” 

“You’ve been into wounding, lately, haven’t you? The spirits tell me that - You wounded Arya, didn’t you? At the wedding.” 

“I’m not the one who didn’t come.” She says, a slight growl belying her words. It’s a habit she’s picked up from Sandor; yet another of his mannerisms that have tangled up with hers, these last few winter weeks. “What the hell do you care, anyways? I thought you weren’t supposed to interfere.” 

“Only when I have.” He answers, “All must occur as it’s occurred.” 

“Is that why we come here? Because we need to be close to the, what, the fucking ‘causal nexus’ of -” 

“I saw that you would drink today,” He said, reminding her entirely too much of Alice’s blue caterpillar. “I wish that I had warned somebody.” 

“But you didn’t, and so you couldn’t. Is that right?”

“You wound me,” He says, his syllables strange and milky, “You’ll wound me. I’m going to miss you, Sansa. I’m sorry for your pain.” 

With that, he extends his hand across the table, so surely that she wonders if he won’t stand up and walk out of the room. But of course, it is only an illusion. Bran can’t walk. He hasn’t been able to walk since Cersei Lannister pushed him off the roof. Neither of them can. 

“I’m leaving,” She says, pushing her chair from the table. The world is wormed with holes. Bran chuckles, a sleepy amnesiac. 

“You’ve left, Sansa. You’ve left.”

* 

She spends the rest of her Sunday, unpredictably, at Sandor’s House off the main drag. She doesn’t know why, exactly, she started coming here; other than Sandor threatened her with death for trying to run away in a dazed stupor one night not long after the wedding. She thinks she was sick of hearing the noises upstairs; and so she chanced the alleyways. Where she found him, naturally, smoking. He used to share her cigarettes with her; a lifetime ago, but now she doesn’t think he would share his name. Still, he had raised a paw at her in greeting.

“Sansa.”

“Sandor.” 

“You fucking stupid, or what, girl?” 

He asked it with a calm, serious levity, though he didn’t seem surprised that she was there. She doubted there was anything she could do that would surprise Sandor Clegane, anymore, but she’d wanted, anyways, to try. 

“Bored.” 

“Of Arya?”

“Of life.” She had admitted, and spun from him hastily, biting the inside of her cheek. He had chuckled, a gravel-stone chuckle, and flicked the corners of his lips upwards, to melt back into what seemed a permanant scowl. 

“Everyone gets bored of life sometime, little bird. But- “ And here his voice dropped an octave, and his eyes were flooded with the glare of a streetlight, for it couldn’t be concern, “It’s fools that test their luck that way.” 

“What of it?” She asks him, holding his gaze. 

“Oh, it’s nothing, girl - I just never thought you were a fool.” 

“Well,” She says, and coughs. She can taste his cigarette smoke in the air. “I never thought I was one either.” 

“So you’re here because…?” 

“Arya won’t stop fucking Gendry when I’m trying to sleep.” 

He full out laughs, then. Laughs like a teenager, like Rickon must have, once. 

“By God, girl, you are a fool! Your sister offers you her comfort, and you discard it because - because what? You’ve kept your mother’s manners?” 

“I would rather them than her values,” She’d said, softly. The eerie disquiet of the city at night, devoid of bustle, had emboldened her. “Lord knows it’s the only thing she has to love me for.”

He’d dragged on his cigarette. Passed it. 

“I’d not be so sure about that.” 

“I’m a childless divorcee who hasn’t any honor. I’ll go to hell for it.” 

“Then you can join your mother there,” He’d said, “And anyone else who’d think ill of you for it.”   
“And you.” She’d said, belatedly, the glow of the cobblestones making her drowsy. 

“Aye. And me.” 

She’d held the cigarette precariously, a white-cased loaded gun. But she sensed, then, that it was time for her to inhale, and the smoke and the nicotine were a welcome burn inside her lungs. Their fingers brushed when she passed it back to him; it felt like white-gold lightning, and she wants to forget it ever happened. 

“You’ll catch your death out here,” He said, when the streetlight and the cigarette began, simultaneously, to dwindle. 

“I’ll manage.”

“Don’t matter none,” He’d said, “Know it’s not any of my business, but I’ll not have you wracked with pneumonia on top of - “ He makes an all-encompassing gesture, “And you’ve not got a lick of sleep. You’ll come to mine.” He nods to himself, “You’ll come to mine. That’ll do it.” 

“I don’t want to,” She had said, and her voice sounded curious and flat. “Go to yours. I have a home, now.” 

“You’ve a home,” He acquiesed, with a slight downwards tilt of the head, “But it isn’t much yours.” 

“No more mine than yours is.” She shot back, “No less mine than yours is.” 

“Mine,” He responded, “Is closer. And I’ve been meaning to have a word with you -"

“Since I was fourteen years old.” 

His scowl deepened. 

“Since you pulled that stunt at the sept. It wasn’t so bad as I’ve seen in my life, but it wasn’t good of you. You frightened me, little bird. A word, so as I could make sure there was naught to be frightened of.” 

“You’ve naught to be frightened of.” She’d said, “There. Can I go, now?”

He had pierced her with a gaze, his gray eyes queer. 

“You’ll take my coat,” He’d said, “And you’ll know where I am if I’m needed.” 

With that he had shrugged off his jacket, and produced from it, miraculously, a pen and a crumpled receipt, on whose back he had scribbled what she presumed was his address. The note was transferred, with a second lightning’s bolt, and the jacket was draped, unceremoniously, over shoulders that had begun to feel the biting cold.

“I’ll be seeing you,” He had said, and, at her quizzical stare, “When your chirping tells you to bring it back. You’re not a thief, little bird.” 

She wasn’t. Which was how she found herself, less than a week after their chance meeting, folding both jacket and once-white sweatshirt into a reusable grocery bag and slinking out of Winterfell’s back entrance. It led past the stables, and a memory hit her with the force of a bullet; herself and Lady, rolling in the dirt, until Septa Mordane had caught her and showed her to her mother. It had been the worst scolding of her life that day, and the shame that dawned inside her mother had hurt her worse than any wound; but she burned with a worse guilt: she couldn’t regret the unadulterated joy that she had experienced as she shed the disguise of a lady to indulge in the whims of a child. And Lady, too, was dead. She had shaken the memory off of her, and keeled onto the long dirt road. 

It had taken her less time than she would have liked to reach the main drag, a handsomely paved street. She could see the little matchstick girl in every window. It had taken her longer to decipher Sandor’s address, for his previously dismal handwriting was further abetted by the horrendous nighttime lighting, and his letters could have sooner been called Dornish than Common. 

She’d found it, though. His flat, a first-floor, on one of the closest honeyed turn-offs. It was an old building. If not for the black-painted bricks and the yellow swathed mortar, she’d not have known she had it right. It must be a family building, she’d surmised, before remembering with a jolt that for Sandor, like so many, there was no ‘family’. The building was his own. Her suspicions were confirmed by the knocker; a vicious, snarling dog that was heated and heavy to the touch. She had scarcely brought it down when she heard the thudding of his footsteps on the stairs, and then he’d thrown the door open, a tall, disheveled man. 

“I brought your jacket back,” She’d said, thrusting the bag into arms that barely outstretched to receive them. “And your sweatshirt. From -"

“You kept my sweatshirt?”

“It’s like you said. It wasn’t mine; I’m not a thief.” 

He’d raised his eyebrow, but made no comment. His elbow and arm had braced him in the doorway, and he’d seemed, for a time, to forget himself, until the sound of someone cursing across the street snapped him out of it. 

“Come in?”

“Alright.” 

The flat, on the inside, had been the same as the flat on the outside. The walls were painted black, which constricted the space like a vice, and the moulding had given her a sudden, violent picture of golden hair that sent her fleeing to his bathroom with a sick, roiling stomach. She had taken a few breaths to calm herself, ran water on her face in a ritual as old and as useless as time, and settled herself back onto his sofa; a much more appealing chocolate brown.

“Tea.” He’d said, setting a tea tray down in the middle of the table, “Milk. Sugar.”

“Thank you. I - I take coffee, actually - I’m sorry, you don’t want to know that - I shouldn’t even be telling you, Arya’s the person that I live with, I just - I thought you might, for - For next time.” _Fuck._

“I’ll keep it in mind.” 

“I’m sorry,” She’d said, and it poured out in a torrent, “I’m sorry, you - obviously you weren’t expecting guests, I can leave now, I didn’t mean to - to insinuate -" 

“Hush.” 

He’d said it sternly, and it had thoroughly silenced her. 

“If I minded it, you wouldn’t be here. So stop your chirping,” He’d shot a look at the tea tray, “And drink.” 

She had, and found that the tea was brewed strongly, and was not altogether unpleasant. A small hum of appreciation escaped her parted lips. 

“Thank you,” She said, again, “I’m sorry that the sweatshirt isn’t clean. It’s - I got out as much as I could.”

“No bother.” 

And so, introductions concluded, they began to pass the day. 

Sandor’s house really was so warm and inviting, if the walls were to be ignored, that she hadn’t beared to leave, and there hadn’t been the time nor the sobriety to properly catch up before. She asked him about the house; he explained that his grandfather’d bought it as a summer retreat, to accustom the boys to the city life, and that he had always favored it over Gregor, and had often hoped to call it home. He asked her how it was at Wintefell; she said that all was well. Arya and Gendry were getting on as could be expected, and now that she’d finally had the chance to clean the place, it gleamed like winter snow. The only trouble she had, she explained to him, was the trek that it took to get to the weirwood. Winters of ice and erosion had made the path too jagged to walk with ease.

“Not that I want to pray to my father’s gods,” She had backpedaled, “But-”

“There’s more use in a weirwood than praying.”

“Exactly. It’s like parklands - it should be preserved for its beauty, and its history, and since Arya’s not going to do it… It falls to me.” 

“Bloody hell. You take your duties seriously.” 

“They’re good for me,” She’d said, “I think.” The tea was warming her belly, or it might have been the proximity, or the fact that never once had he lied to her, but she found she trusted Sandor Clegane, Hound or not. “I think everyone needs something to keep themselves busy. It hits too hard if they don’t.” 

“The war?”

“Humanity. The war was just a symptom.” 

“You talk like we’re a bane.”

“‘Underneath it all, we’re just savages’. It’s a band I used to listen to, before the fighting started, but I think they got it right. What other animal kills its kin and finds pleasure?” 

“Power,” He had said, “Not pleasure, I think. It’s power that we love.” 

“I don’t.” She’d said, but as she said it she had known she was lying. She craved control of her body, control of her mind. Her mind was the fortress that shielded her, and, yes, she loved the power that she held over it. “Not enough to start a war.” 

“You’d be shocked,” He’d said, “At what women’d start a war for.”

It made her bitter. The way he’d talked, as if it were only women on whom to pin the problem, but then - but then, this was the Hound. 

“What of men?” She’d asked him, “Would their desires not surprise me?”

“After what I’ve heard of your life, little bird? I should certainly hope that they wouldn’t.” 

They must’ve talked that way there for hours, until the doorbell rang, and Sandor rose to answer it with a glower afixed. 

“Tenants,” He’d said, to the question that she hadn’t asked, “Have to make a living somehow. Can’t be a soldier, anymore, what with -" 

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re always bloody sorry.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

“I didn’t say I mind it.” 

“But isn’t everyone?” 

“Nay, girl. They’ve their own lives to live, they haven’t time for mine.”

She’d breathed in his honesty, exhaled - curiosity, if she had to put words to it now. 

“Why do you call me ‘girl’? It’s only that - I know I have problems, and I know that I’ve brought them down on myself. The drinking, and the loneliness. The loneliness, more. But I’m not fourteen anymore, Sandor, and I know you don’t like lies, so - I thought I might as well say that I don’t understand why you think that I am, and let you do your worst.” 

She wasn’t proud of her speech. It was a recurring theme. When she got home the first thing she did was underline the sentence _You are not a public speaker_ on her whiteboard. Just in case it evaded her, the next time she got a mind to make some grandiose proclamation. 

She had, honestly, wanted to die. 

Maybe Sandor’d seen that, because he took pity on her by being twice as brutal as usual. (Also on her whiteboard, also underlined, _Send the man a thank you note. ~~Hand deliver.~~_ ) 

“Girl, you don’t understand much. I don’t know what a state you’re in, pretending you’re something you’re not, but I’ll tell you something: You could’ve saved yourself. You could’ve saved yourself, and you decided against it. Until you get that chance again, and do it right, you’ll always be a child.”  
“But I lived,” She had said, as if it were some magical get out of jail free card. “I lived, I survived. I -” 

“Would rather’ve died, wouldn’t you’ve?” 

She had stared at her nails, then, and the tea going cold in its cup, like - Like a child, really. 

“You don’t know me.”

“I know enough, girl. And I know what I offered - It made you afraid, didn’t it? Afraid of - What _were_ you afraid of, little bird? Me?”

He’d come close to her, so that she could feel his heat, waves of it, a strong, solid heat that she wasn’t entirely sure wouldn’t scald her. His eyes were bottomless pits of -

Distaste, mired by anger and blazing worry. 

“Sansa,” He said, drawing a finger under her chin, “You were right for it. Being afraid of me. Wartimes-”  
“‘They bring out the worst in people’. You’re quoting my father now?” 

“I read his memoirs. They were telling.” 

“They told of the same things all Northerners tell of,” She’d said, dodging him, and spinning to her feet, a safe distance away. “War. Winter. The only difference is that one hasn’t happened yet.” 

She had been goading him, she realized. Daring him to tell her she was wrong. He couldn’t. 

“If you’d left with me,” He had said, an unfaltering intensity, “You may’ve lived to see the same pain as you had, or you mayn’t have lived at all. But it would’ve been your choosing, girl. You could have had your power over it, and made peace with yourself for the danger.” 

“I have made peace with myself for the danger. It wasn’t my fault.” 

“I think it was, though.”

“How dare you-”

“I think it was the consequences of your choosing. It’s all about power, little bird, and I held that power out to you. You looked me in the eyes and said you didn’t want it.” He lifted his hands, mockingly, “Okay, okay, if you don’t want it, fine! But between the two of us - I bet you stayed up weeping every night of that bloody marriage, grieving over the choice that you made. Don’t try to deny it.” 

“If I tried,” She’d asked him, then, so ready for the answer, “Would you kill me?”

And he stared at her, the same stare she thought she’d seen him make at King’s Landing when he feared for her,

“If anyone tried to hurt you, I would kill them.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“Well enough. Why, little bird? Do you want to die?”

Did she? Whenever she asked herself that, she remembered the shame she would bring to her family. Then she remembered that she didn’t have a family, anymore, except for Bran who didn’t give a shit and Arya who had shamed them already. 

“More than anything,” She had told him, and then she had turned. “Don’t you have to let your tenant in?”

“He can wait. It’s only Bronn.”

There was another thing, another piece of the puzzle she had wanted solved.

“You and Bronn - Are you…”

“We’ve been close for many years, little bird. We kept each other alive and then some, durng the war, and before, when we were children.” His grin’d turned briefly feral, “You’d forgot I was a child, hadn’t you?”

“In truth?” 

A snarl,

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” 

“I cannot imagine you as a child. Even if I know you were one - I imagine, as a child, that you were just as you are now, and then I realize that it can’t be true, and I’m the one who can’t see it.” 

He grunted, 

“Wasn’t much to see. Everyone I knew then died or tried to kill me, ‘cept for Bronn. We met at the home. We weren’t too different from each other, and we both got on, which was saying something, considering the sort that we got in the home.”

“And then?”

“And then we grew up, and fought a war. It doesn’t matter one lick what you think of somebody. Once you’ve fought with them, you can’t ever be cleaved from one another.” 

“Then I suppose,” She had said, “That you should be glad you liked Bronn anyways.”

“Aye, girl. Glad. You could say that.”

She had shot a look at the door. 

“Aren’t you going to let him in?”

“Didn’t anyone tell you to mind your own business?”

“My mother,” She had said, “But. You wanted me here, and - You want Bronn here, too.”

“Do I, now?”

“You would’ve told him - You would’ve told him to ‘fuck off’ if you wanted him to fuck off So - given that you haven’t - Yeah, you want Bronn here, too.” 

“When did you learn to be smart, girl?”

He hadn’t asked her sarcastically. He had asked her like he really did want the answer, and it sprang from her mouth more fully formed than Athena had sprung from Zeus’s forehead.

“The same time everyone did.”

So she had left then, brushing shoulders with Bronn Blackwater, even as the oily fingers of Sandor’s flat had tried to cling to her, and she had torn them off of her to writhe in the street and disintegrate in the hot, intrusive sunlight. And then come back the next week, and the next one, and today. 

“Four weeks,” He said, when he answered the door. 

“You’re counting the alleyway?”

“Of course I’m counting the fucking alleyway.”

He had her coffee ready for her, now, black and acrid. It’s a test to her, she told him, another way to remind herself that this is the world she lives in, and that the world she lives in is cruel. _You don’t trust anyone?_ He had asked her, and she had shaken her head. _Better not to_ , she had told him, _It isn’t worth the pain._ Four weeks, and already she had left her brand on his apartment; the feminine touch of a new bar of soap, once she saw that he had none and proclaimed it unhygienic. A throw pillow she had snagged from her room at Winterfell, to make the place appealing. Cans of paint that he said he would get to, when he had a moment’s rest. She has invaded his life like crabgrass invades Winterfell’s driveway, and, like Arya, Sandor can’t be bothered to weed.

* 

He hands her a key when she gets inside. Chrome on copper. Copper on gold.

“Bronn doesn’t have a key.” She says, and feels stupid for saying it. 

“Bronn thinks he’s my mother.” 

It’s true. Just last week he left a voicemail on Sandor’s phone, reminding him to eat his vegetables and not go outside without his cane. _If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t use the bloody thing,_ Sandor had said, and she had withheld the fact that she thought Bronn’s reminder’s hilarious - or would have, had she been able to contain the laughter. (I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I just - he cares about you. He wants you to be safe.) (Fucking hell.) 

“I’ll lose it,” She says. 

“Good. I’m sick of you.” 

For a slick, churning instant, she thinks that he means it, and with a burning face she attempts a dignified retreat, but his hand catches at her wrist, and pulls her back to him. 

“I was only joking.” He says, “Sansa, surely you knew that I was only joking.”

Four weeks, and he calls her Sansa, now. 

“I knew - Know. Does it work, or is it like, a show thing?” 

“I don’t do ‘show things’, little bird.”

“I was only asking.” 

“Why, did you think it was - a ‘show thing’?”

“Arya does that.” 

“No?”

“Yeah. She gave a fake key to Gendry, and Gendry’s her husband. I don’t even think mine works - that’s why I use the back door.”

“Naturally.”

“It’s actually because she doesn’t trust me with my own life, but, you know, whatever.”

“Someone’s in a mood.”

“Got it from you.”

“Somebody’s - You’re not, are you?”

She jerks, profusely.

“No! Christ, I - No. After the wedding - I think it would be best to avoid a repeat of that scenario. Also, Arya confiscated all of our booze.” 

“Good on her.” He says, “Good on Arya.”

She scowls. A Sandor scowl that’s at least seven sizes too big for her, and quickly slides to puddle on the floor. 

“I’m going to sic Bronn on you.” She says, “You literally never use your cane.” 

Their weekends have led them to this, she thinks, as she takes her seat - her seat - on his sofa. To this empty-threat banter, this easy comraderie. She can’t begin to wrap her head around it; around him. He wasn’t like this, not before. More aptly, he was, but couldn’t afford to let it show, and hid it behind the same ironwrought doors that she fashioned in her words and in her actions. To perserve himself. That was why he did it. 

And those walls, they haven’t gone away completely, and what has hasn’t gone away completely. Beneath the veil, their remains some part of Sandor that is like them; tough. Practical. Abhorrent of liars, and the lies that they tell. It’s what else is there that matters; though, to her. The kindness that bleeds into his gruff, barking tone. The concern that he shows for her, whenever he thinks she isn’t looking, that makes a rosy blush bloom through her limbs. How he tells her, every Sunday before she leaves, to be careful - even that first time, as she had bumped shoulders with Bronn and left him speechless on her way out the door. 

How he asks her to leave early, so she won’t get stuck out after dark. 

How she keeps coming back to give him his coat when, invariably, she doesn’t. 

How he says, 

“If you sic Bronn on me, I’ll take your apartment key.” 

And how she knows exactly how to respond to him now, by rolling her eyes like Arya would, even if it reminds her of that absurd childhood fear she had of them falling out of her head by accident. The only thing that’s bad is how the silence descends to choke them when nothing’s being said, so she halts it’s imminent advance. 

“Do you have any string?”

“Junk drawer.” 

He keeps everything in his junk drawer; it’s the first one left of the dishwasher. It contains, last she inventoried: Scissors, a hammer(broken), a pink plastic sippy cup lid, puzzle pieces meticulously labeled with masking tape, masking tape (and duck tape and _Scotch_ tape and doubled sided _Scotch_ tape and glossy _Scotch_ tape, for wrapping), miscellaneus wood tiles, batteries, loose change, fabric samples, a limited edition Calvin and Hobbes matchstick box, and one third of a phonebook from 1982. It is, all things considered, a rather large drawer. Ensconced amongst the detritus is the pride and joy of Sandor’s collection: A complete sewing kit, courtesy of the Clegane’s septa. _Short-lived woman_ , he had said, ensuring it was not misspoken. She got the feeling Gregor was involved, and so she hadn’t pressed the issue. The sewing kit was a marvel of modern home economics; twenty-three seperate compartments. A matching needle-and-thimble set and custom pincushion - which had been replaced by each generation of Clegane’s and which Gregor had replaced with, disturbingly, a Sandor-shaped voodoo doll. Or so he had told her, after further replacing it as an unoffensive honeybee. _It’s what Eleanor’d have liked._ The level of drunkenness necessary to illicit that confession - she preferred not to dwell over. Suffice it to say, he hadn’t realized at first that their Sunday’s would be a tradition. 

She didn’t mind the drinking, though. Everybody drank. She drank. What she minded was - 

How she had found him. Lying on the floor of his apartment, his cane too far to reach. Twitching on the ground, in the throes of some vision or nightmare. Nightmare, she’d determined, upon advancing; his eyes were closed, his fingers grasping for invisible bedsheets to pull and twist and sully. She had done the best thing she could think of doing; she had offered him herself instead. And he had taken what she offered, had almost snapped her wrist with the force of his grasp, had pulled her down on top of him and _rolled_ , so that she lay over that place where his pulse came lone and steady, a wild crash of symbols in the grip of a demonic wraith. His mouth had been open in silent screams; but it was when the sound of them suffused the air that he woke; woke like a madman; and it was when his face contorted in shame and sorrow that she realized it was not him who had broken the silence.   
He had rolled himself off of her, not daring to look her in the eyes. 

“Sandor,” She had said, as he went about some well-established recovery ritual, “Sandor. Do you - Do you want me to make you some coffee?”

“Why?”

He had sounded strangled.

“Tea would soothe your throat,” She’d said, “But coffee would stop the - Coffee would keep you awake.”

“A - Aye.” 

He had one of the old-school coffee makers, and she’d been happy for it; it had given her something to do, and an excuse to watch Sandor as he ran his hands through his long, parted hair and shoved a clean shirt over his shoulders - despite there being nothing to suggest that the original was soiled. Nothing except his own humiliation. A strong motivator, in and of itself. He was ashamed of himself - she could tell. You didn’t live for so long - you didn’t survive so long, during a war - without learning how to read what people thought, and what they felt. When she’d handed him his coffee, black as the apartment’s walls, she saw that his hands were shaking, and she had wrapped her’s around it on the handle of the mug. There had been hope in his eyes, then, and a silent fear, but mostly that shame, and that self-same loathing, that compelled him to wonder to himself why she sought to do what she did. She had met him for it, in the middle, and had told him, as gently as she could muster, 

“I’m afraid that you might break it.” 

He had let her hold it with him, for the longest eternity, and when she had brought her other hand upwards, he had, unconsciously, mirrored it. She had near jumped from him, then, her subconscious not registering the impending touch as friendly - if, indeed, it was friendly. With Sandor, it was always so hard to tell. But she had known, somehow, the same way that she had known how badly he felt for having hurt her, and because of his hatred of lying, that he wouldn’t - but some impulse stilled her, and sent her to ghosting his cheek. It was alien to her; a veritable landscape of craters, of valleys and moorlands and crag-peaked hills, yet it had hummed with a heat that promised life, and ephemeral sentience; a pearl clamped firmly inside its scarred clamshell. 

She had felt the instant that his fingers reached her; they were tracing her cheekbones, over and over, a touch that barely was, so gentle, yet so strong and sure, that she’d felt that it might kill her. He had touched her like a man that wasn’t there. And breathed her name, as they lay there, together. 

“Sansa,” He had breathed, “Sansa, I’m so sorry-”

“You’ve done nothing,” She had told him, because it was true, “You’ve done nothing to be sorry for Sandor, and as for the past - We’ll put that behind us, yeah?” 

“Aye,” He’d gasped, “Aye, but Sansa-" 

“I want you to know,” She had said, speaking too fast for her mouth, “That you’re beautiful. I know you don’t always think it, because - because I don’t always think it, either, but you are. Please - Sandor, please believe me when I say that.”

“I -”

“You didn’t.” 

She had lied to him. She regretted that part, afterwards, but the bruises didn’t; and he had seen them. She knew that he had. As she’d said it, she had known that he had. That he was seeing them, out the corner of his eyes, even while they were locked with her own. 

“Sandor,” She asked him, when his breathing became stable, and his coffee became a jolt of calming adrenaline, “What were you dreaming of?”

“Nothing,” He had said, and blinked in shame, “My sister. Eleanor.”

She hadn’t known what to say to that. There was a story there, but she couldn’t bear to ask for its telling, so instead she had told him, 

“I dream about Rickon, sometimes. He was so young when he died, and, Seven, I barely knew him, but he - He was my brother. My younger brother. And I thought - I thought about him, about the life he could’ve lead. I thought about it all the time. I knew he had so many people that loved him - the spirit of every Stark of Winterfell, but in my dreams, he died alone, and begging to be saved by a god that wasn’t real.” 

“Little bird-”

“In my dreams, the god was me. I saw him there, in the snow, and I could see the life bleed out of him, and I could feel that if only I reached down I could push his tiny little soul back inside of his tiny little body, but some evil force kept me from moving; and then it was over, and I saw it float up past me, like a pine needle on the wind; this pitiful, flickering spark that used to be my brother. I watched as the north winds bore down upon it and tore it limb from flickering limb, and scattered it to the most desolate places the earth has to offer, and the whole time he was screaming out for summer, and my father had a hand on my shoulder, and he said to let it be; that winter is coming, always coming, and that I like Rickon had to learn to love the snow. But there wasn’t any; there was never any snow. It was only ever raining.”

His throat was dry as a desert; she could tell by the way that he grimaced when he swallowed. His hand was still on her face, but the cup set aside left room for him to take up her slender bird’s wrist, and he rested it in his palm like a cup full of sand. 

“It doesn’t matter,” She had told him, “How they die in the end. It only matters what they did while they were living. And while he was living, Rickon was a Stark. For me - For me, that has to be enough.” 

“It wasn’t,” He had said, “Can’t make up none for the bloodshed.” 

The moment that passed in their gaze and their guilt was an agony.

“Eleanor was a honeybee. She took everyone’s demons into herself like pollen from a flower, and turned them into sweet honey with her laughter.” _It’s like they say,_ she had thought, _The bees are disappearing._ “She knew everything she could, Eleanor did, and she took care of the people who no-one else would. And she - She was so happy all the time. Even when she was hurting.”

She had seen it, then. It spread a bitter cold through her body, that understanding, and her whole self was wracked with a violent shiver that left her empty. 

“Gregor killed her, didn't he?”

“He did far worse than that, little bird.” He had dropped to a whisper, so broken no man could have fixed it, “He let me love her first.” 

He didn't talk about his life after that. 

She thinks that he likes to pretend it didn’t happen; that he operates on the basis of the past being the past, and the future, also, being the past. If he takes one step backwards to remember it, it’ll be the end of him, so he just keeps going, living only in the present, and the microscopic comforts he glean from it, until it, too, becomes the past. 

Until she, too, becomes the past. 

She sleeps with that night, though, now that his sweatshirt is gone. The lilt of his burr, the tenderness that was rarely so evident, and his sister, Eleanor, whom he had sang to, before the night was over, in a rough-hewn, cedar voice. It’s better than her dreams, after all. 

But to him, it’s just the past. 

In the present, she takes his sewing scissors and snips a length of thread to string his key on, and just when she thinks that he’s forgotten her again; she slips it, the start of a brand new beginning, inside of her dress collar.

* 

Ray told him, once, that there was something to be said for nightmares. That if you went back and examined them - _With a keen eye, and a yearning for the truth_ \- you could learn to have a life. He wonders what Ray would think of him, these days. Now that he dreams about murdering Sansa Stark.

The dreams didn’t start the night of wolf girl’s wedding; they started after that. After she got it in her head that she was a part of his life, and not just some face in a subway advertisement. Not just some girl that he’d saved (And saved and saved, it seemed to him, as long’s she needed saving.) They started after that awful, awful Sunday, when it hadn’t shocked her that he’d turned to the drink, didn’t make her cower in fear of him when he’d almost broken the frail little bird’s little bones and crushed her in his sleep. Gods, but she must have been terrified - 

And she had come there to see him. To see him, because she thought he was kind. 

He tells nobody. 

On this, he’ll keep his silence, no matter how Bronn presses. They do everything together; he was sure before she brought it up that she had noticed. Perhaps the line between Bronn and the rest is that Bronn’s his family; and he doesn’t know how to apply that word to anyone who isn’t, right this very minute. Not even Ray. Not even Sansa. So he doesn’t tell Bronn, either, that when he dreams now, he murders Sansa Stark. 

He does it when she’s in the kitchen, making him his coffee. He can see the halo of her hair in his bedroom-door mirror, the one that Bronn got him for his birthday, so that he could ‘learn to love himself again’. Her pretty little body, bent over his counter at a twenty degree angle. She’s filling the caraffe with hot water; she’s pouring it into the machine; she’s putting in a filter; she’s spilling half a bag of coffee grounds on the carpeting he doesn’t have. He sees her in the mirror as she drops to all fours to clean it. But it’s Gregor he sees as he leaps on her with his grandmother’s silver-point sewing needle and stabs her, forty-three times in the chest. The dreams get hazy then - they are swamped with other soupy pictures, of battles and bastards and Bolton and Baelish, sneaking his hands under her skirt - but when the fog recedes she is bleeding to death in the weirwood, and Eleanor screams at him to save her, a buzzing yellow bee. By the time that it ends he is weeping over her lifeless body; he had the needle and the thread, but it was Sansa who knew how to sew. 

Dogs only know how to chase their own tails; how to hunt, how to follow a trail. Which is how he finds himself, at every turn, following the trail of Sansa, as she edges herself ever closer. As if she could get any closer. As if he wouldn’t kill her if she tried. He’ll let himself into his flat and see a casserole dish that she left for him in a flagrant abuse of her key; he’ll wake up on Sunday to see that she’s texted him, asking if 11’s too early to meet, but Arya’s tagging a sept. He hates that it means they see each other more often, but it’s the sort of thing Arya’d do. The little bird has just enough sense to be wary around him, when she’s in her right mind; she dances and toes at the line. When they do talk, it is bitter; colored by a shared understanding, that life is too short, and it’s blessings too barren, to warrant reflection. So their stories are told with a scalpel’s precsion; cutting out the painful words, and replacing them with scenes of fantasy. Their arguments stray well from the source of the fighting. Their jokes are made over the vaguest, shallowest layers of the past; they touch the scabs, but make no move to rip them off. They see the scars, but skirt them. In his dreams, if he isn’t murdering her, he rotates around her in an elliptical orbit. 

Still, there are days when he forgets about their closeness; and would not know if it, except for Bronn, standing in his living room, asking if he has any leftovers. _Of the lasagna_ , he will say, _the wonderful lasagna that Sansa made for you after you fucked._

( _We haven’t fucked,_ he’ll tell Bronn. _Then you should,_ he’ll say, _If for nothing else, as thanks for the fucking lasagna._ )

She wouldn’t want it, though. 

He can tell that she wouldn’t, because in their game of cat and mouse; of hound and little bird; there is no room for the touch of a lover. She would shy from it, instinctively, and if by some miracle she initiated it, he wouldn’t know how to respond. Bronn would say that’s no deterrent. Ray would say that it’s time for him to let go of all his insecurities; but what do either of those men know about him? 

“Only everything,” She said, rooting through his fridge on a -

“It’s Wednesday.”

“You gave me a key.” 

“For Sundays.”

“For your flat.” 

“What are you looking for, anyways?”

“Anything that won’t spoil on the road back to Winterfell. Arya refuses to go grocery shopping since they changed the rate on the rewards cards.” 

“She’s boycotting food?”

“She claims that, and I quote, ‘wolves can hunt’. Which may work fine for her, but I for one prefer the miracle of mass-produced high-intake carbohydrates. You don’t get any better than eating an entire pot of pasta by yourself while thinking about all the men that fucked you over.” 

She jokes, but he can tell that she isn’t truly joking; she doesn’t look up from his fridge as she sifts through the beer cans and fresh drawers - 

“Don’t you use butter? On like, anything?” 

“I-”

“Why is everything in bags?”

He’d crossed his arms over his chest.

“What’s in bags, little bird?”

“Only everything.” 

Her nose had wrinkled, then. 

“Oh, that’s _foul._ ”

“Yes. That would be the dried liver. For - Stranger, girl, can’t you go?”

“Where?”

“To the store, if it’s so important to you.” 

She freezes, goes so statue-still that he is afraid she’s left the world. 

“Arya thinks I’m going to drink myself to death.” She says, finally. “She thinks - That I can’t be trusted with my life anymore.” She lets out a choked, thorny sob then. On her knees, in his kitchen, raising thoughts that shouldn’t be raised. _If, by some miracle_ \- “I would have. After- Everything. But things are - things are better now. I _swear._ ” She devolves, then, into a quivering mass of self-loathing which which he’s acutely familiar. He is too afraid to touch her- she’s in another world entirely, a tattered place inside herself where memories flit through the chill, foggy air like computer-screen glitches and dead men steal her smile; he will not stoop to aid them. But neither will he remain silent, and deny her the tenterhook that can drag her back into reality; if she chooses to reenter. 

“I believe you,” He says - because he does. Because if Sansa Stark could survive what she has, then she can survive anything. “It’s alright now, little bird. It’s alright.”

They are borrowed words, his borrowed words, but her fright is a crimson wave that steals coherent thought from him. He tries to fall back on the kindest recollections; the ones that somehow gave her all her false impressions. The ones where he was tender to her, in his affirmations or his anger. Those others - all the hateful things he said she’d thank him for, when she became a queen - he stores away. They would do her harm right now; more harm than good or evil.

“What if I - What if I’m lying. What if it - What if it’s too late for me -"

“It isn’t.”

Her fog clears, leaving her still, in some darker form of childhood wonder. 

“Sandor-” His name sounds like an old gun on her lips, some promise that he can’t fulfill, “How do you _know?_ ” 

“Same way’s I know the gods aren’t real. Because they aren’t.” 

“Oh, Seven.” She laughs, a raw laugh from a weep-roughened asophagus. Don’t let my mother hear you say that.” 

It sets her off, into a fit almost as violent as before, but in time even this fades, to be replaced by a velvet, wounded silence. _There’s a part of her heart that’s dead,_ he thinks, and hates himself for thinking, even though it’s true. 

“Nothing’s alright,” She says, that night before she leaves him, “Nothing will ever be alright again.”   
“Maybe so. But shouldn’t we try for it?” 

She hurries out the door, as startled as he is that he’s playing optimist. He doesn’t know where to look, so he looks at her shoes; low boots with tough, Northern heels. And in his dreams, he murders Sansa Stark.

* 

She hates the way that Arya looks at her when she slips back into her room. She hates the repulsion on her face when she says she was with Sandor. She hates the way that Bronn snarls at her as she leaves one day, _I’ll kill you if you hurt him,_ like he’s his fucking father. But she hates most that the only person who can do that for her now is Sandor, because given the circumstances, it isn’t any help. She hates the way that Arya asks her, not casually,

“What’s up, _sis_?” 

She hates that she only knows how to answer her by asking,

“Why aren’t you with your husband?”

“Gendry’s out on business, and also, worried.” 

“Your husband worries about me?”

“I worry about you, Sansa. You walk around here like fucking Needle’s sticking out of your chest; you sneak out in at all hours of the night and never tell me where you’ve been; you hardly even talk to me when you are home-”

“Winterfell’s yours.”

She reiterates it because she needs to. 

“Winterfell’s yours, Arya, and I’m fine with that. I came up here to help you get married, not to be the lady of the house.”

“Seeing as you’re never in the house,” Her sister spits, “I can’t see how you would be its lady.” 

“Seeing as you’ve never wanted to be one, I don’t see how you can stand it.” 

“I can’t.” Says Arya, “But I accept my responsibility, Sansa. ‘There should always be a Stark in Winterfell’.” 

“So the saying goes. And what - You don’t want it to be you? And you thought that _I_ was selfish.”

She sees Arya’s eyes flash; and she suddenly feels very sorry for her sister, saddled with all her burdens and her absences, and the life she threw away. 

“You were the selfish one, Sansa, all you ever wanted to do was run away with Joffrey _fucking_ Baratheon-”

“Lannister.”

“You couldn’t have given less of a shit what his name was when you wanted to marry him.” 

“I cared,” She raises, “It was just that his name didn’t seem important while he was beating me.” 

Arya curses underneath her breath.

“I love you,” She says. “But Sansa - Please just tell me where you’ve been going. I want you to be safe-”  
“And I want you to _leave me alone._ Where I go and what I do isn’t any of your business. I’m not the Lady of Winterfell; technically, I don’t even have to stay here if I don’t want to.” 

“So leave, then.”

“I will.” She says, and her tongue feels lanced through with a poisonous spear, “I’ll leave tomorrow. Tell Gendry that I thank him for his hospitality. I wish you many years of happiness. Oh wait - he isn’t here.”

Arya shakes her head, a long, slow shake.

“Why are you always so hateful?” 

Sansa sees black. Then she sees -

_Those men ripping the front of her dress, pushing her down into the hay. They were drunk, and laughing, and saying words she couldn’t say. And he told her that it was alright. He told her that she was alright now, he promised that he wouldn’t hurt her ___

__“sa, Sansa, Sansa! Are you - What -”_ _

__“Sandor.”_ _

__“Sansa?”_ _

__“I asked Sandor that, once.”_ _

__“What did he say?”_ _

__“I’d be glad of all the hateful things he said when I was president.”_ _

__Arya stands, and sits, and stands again._ _

__“You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”_ _

__“Arya -"_ _

__“The way I am, with Gendry?”_ _

__“I don’t know. He’s nice to me, Arya. He doesn’t - He hasn’t _tried_ anything with me, and - I’ve told him things. We know a lot, about each other.”_ _

__“You’re going to see him tomorrow, aren’t you?”_ _

__“Yes.”_ _

__“Can I stop you? Can I - Where does he live, can I kill him?”_ _

__“I’d appreciate it if you didn’t.”_ _

__Arya’s hand is on her belt holster - she carries it with her everywhere, she can’t abide not being able to defend herself - and walks the room in aggravated circles._ _

__“He said he wanted to fuck you bloody.” She says._ _

__She swallows. She can hear him saying it, rough and laced in lust. She can picture him meaning it, too._ _

__“When?”_ _

__“During our travels. He had a fever, at the time, from his leg, and he was delirious, but you know what Old Nan said about deliriousness-”_ _

__“‘It only reveals what’s already deep in you.’”_ _

__“How often have you been seeing him?”_ _

__“Almost every day. He gave me a key to his flat.”_ _

__“Do you think that he’s changed?”_ _

__“As much as anyone else.”_ _

__Arya huffs._ _

__“Fine. As much as anyone else. But - As much as anyone else, in a good way?”_ _

__“Yes.”_ _

__She says it immediately, with no hesitation, and an ardor that chills her to her core. “ _Yes._ He’s a good person now, Arya. He wouldn’t hurt me. He told me once that he’d kill anyone who tried to hurt me, and I didn’t believe him, then, but -”_ _

__“Now you do.”_ _

__“Yes.”_ _

__“What, would he hit them over the head with his cane?” Arya gulps in a breath, or a laugh._ _

__“A shovel,” She says, “And if anyone tried to hurt him, I would stab their eyes out with a sewing needle.”_ _

__“What happened to being merciful?”_ _

__“Joffrey had our father shot in the head.”_ _

__“I don’t like it,” Says Arya._ _

__“I know. But - You had to be with Gendry, didn’t you?” Arya nods. “I _have_ to be with Sandor. That’s just how I feel.”_ _

__“Then that’s how you feel,” Says Arya. “But if he hurts you -”_ _

__“Then I’ll let you at what’s left of him when I’m finished.”_ _

__Arya grins, then, as wide as the crescent moon._ _

__“Tell him I say hello,” She says, giving a quick assassin’s hug, “With my teeth.”_ _

__“He’ll hear it.”_ _

__“No,” Says Arya, “He won’t. I couldn’t let Syrio down like that.”_ _

__“I love you.” She says, to Arya’s retreating back. “I love you, and I’m staying.”_ _

__“Do yourself a favor,” Says Arya, tossing it over her shoulder like a bag of potatoes, “And go stay with Sandor instead.”_ _

____

* 

The phone in his hands is blasting him with radiation. The decay of this relationship that he’s trying to save, because - He owes it to himself, and to Ray. The numbers burn him as he dials. He told Bronn that he was going to do this - He told him, yesterday, at the pub. It was one of those rare days that Sansa hadn’t come, and his flat had felt so inexplicably empty that it drove him into the streets, cane in hand.

 _Why_ , Bronn had asked him, _Who are you doing it for?_

_Myself,_ he had said. _Myself._

And Bronn had smiled then. His best, his oldest friend, had smiled. How long had it been since he’d made Bronn Blackwater smile? Long enough to tell him that he was doing the right thing, even though he hadn’t a clue what to say if Ray even answered. The phone seemed to ring for a lifetime, the tone that he imagined you heard when you died and went to hell. But eventually he heard the line pick up, and stole a breath to hold inside his lungs, something to keep him from losing his nerve. 

“Sandor?” The Elder Brother asked him, and with that, he let it out. 

“Ray.” 

“Sandor.” 

“Ray, I’m so sorry I haven’t called you, I didn’t mean to - After everything you’ve done, I didn’t mean to -”

“You needed your time.” 

“Aye.”

“You’ve had it, then. I’m glad to hear from you, Sandor, how have you been?”

“Good.” He says, a weight lifting off of him, “I’ve been good.”

“It warms my heart.”

“I’ve taken up my brother’s house. Bronn - My friend, Bronn’s renting upstairs.”

“Then life has brought you luck and fortune.”

“Aye, at that.”

“Why have you called me, Sandor?”

“I-"

“You’ve had your time, and I won’t begrudge you that, but something made you do this. I’d like to know what it is.”

He closes his eyes and lets Ray’s soothing presence float over him. It used to make him angry - _Who did this man think he was?? He wasn’t entitled to anything_ \- but now, it makes him want to confess. 

“I found peace with myself,” He says, tasting the words and finding them sweet. “And the man I used to be.”

“Then you have no need for me.” 

“No-“ He shouts it, cringing, “No. I’ve - I’ve come to peace with the fact that I need people. Bloody fuck, I can’t believe I just-”

“Sandor. You’ve made astounding progress. I’m glad that you’ve come to this conclusion on your own. I was getting sick of telling you.”

When the Elder Brother smiles, he can hear it, and the Elder Brother is smiling, the second person he’s made smile in a day. It’s not as impressive as Sansa’s record - nothing could be - but he’ll take it. 

“I’d like to visit you.” Ray says, and his gasp echoes over the line and back.

“Here? At my-”

“If you’ll have me.”

“I’d be honored,” He says.

“The honor is mine.”

“Ours.” He says, “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“I think,” Says the Elder Brother, “That you could, now.” 

“I think you’ve too much faith in me.”

“My boy,” Says Ray, and he thinks about Sansa while he says it, hoping that she’ll be there that day, so that Ray can see how fucking _beautiful_ she is, “there’s nothing wrong with faith.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! There are going to be two more chapters after this, which I plan to get up in the next couple of weeks - one next week, and one the week after that. So keep an eye out if you're interested in how this piece of hot mess ends! 
> 
> Sansa's line about power and humanity is from _Savages_ by Marina and the Diamonds. 
> 
> The bees disappearing comes from a lot of things, but in my mind I pulled it out of the finale of _Doctor Who_ s4. 
> 
> And, finally, the dried liver in Sandor's fridge is a reference to s2e4 of _Queer Eye_ , _The Handyman Can_. It's one of my favorite episodes - probably because there's romance at the end, and I'm a sucker for it. 
> 
> I'll see you guys back here, next week, for part 3 of _There Are Always_!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Sansa runs from her problems, and Sandor carries on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here I am, a week late with this update. Sorry about that - real life is a thing that happens, and it happened to cut my writing time in half the last couple of weeks. However, the third part of this story is finally up and ready to share with you guys, and on that note: 
> 
> Remember how I said this story was angsty? This is the chapter where it goes from angsty to pretty dark. Trigger warnings in here for suicide, alcoholism, and mentions of past abuse. If those subjects are triggering for you, please leave this fic and go somewhere else.
> 
> To those of you who are still here, enjoy, and I'll see you back here next week for the fourth and final installment of _There Are Always_ , and thank you for sticking with me for this dark, wild ride!
> 
> Disclaimer: As always, if I owned them, do you really think I'd be here?

She knows that he drinks. 

She wants to tell him this, every time that he pretends it never happened - _I know that you drink_. In fact she wants to tell him every time that he takes the superior hand with her - which is a nasty, snarling habit that he lapses into, whenever he can’t accept that he’s content. He will ask her, if she says anything at all that implies she cares for him, on a level he deems undeserved, if she has been drinking lately. She wants to say, _No, but I know that you have_ , but it wouldn’t make a difference, in the end. 

It isn’t like he likes her.

* 

He doesn’t have the heart to tell Bronn to ‘fuck off’ anymore. It’s what he would do, if he were a stronger-willed man - above his old friend’s caring. Above it all. But it seems to him, when he looks in the mirror, that he isn’t a strong-willed man, anymore. She’s made sure of that. She makes a point now of -

Touching them. 

Whenever she comes over, pulling him down and nuzzling their noses and touching his _fucking_ scars. He doesn’t know how it started, but he knows that he wants it to end. Gods, but he can’t stand her sometimes. Mayhaps it would be easier, if he were any other person, but he is - and always has been - totally and completely himself. And no matter how many times and in how many ways he tries to explain to her that men like him don’t deserve to be seen like that, Sansa doesn’t listen. 

He’s done everything he knows how to do with her. He’s made her dinner and had a heart to fucking heart with her. He’s texted her - honest to God her - to remind her that he doesn’t deserve her forgiveness. He’s done the usual things, too - He shook her one night when she overstayed her welcome, and got a hand around her throat. There wasn’t any pressure on it, but she knew that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that she was small, still. He could’ve done it. _Look at me, girl_ he had said. He had probably said that, before, but it was too damn hard to remember. _I couldn’t save you then,_ he’d told her, _And I couldn’t save you, now, if you needed it_. It still tasted bitter when he said it, like that Dornish sour that he’d favored, and even after all these years, it still wasn’t a lie. He had felt her life pulsing in his fist like a current in a broken cable - stronger than him, it had always been stronger then him. She was like a candle, her, with her hair all afire and her pale wax skin, and in that moment he had felt how quickly he could snuff it out. 

That wasn’t the part that had scared him. 

The next day she’d come back to him - or, as the case would be, he’d come back to her. She’d bathed his hands - he hadn’t known why they were bleeding - and scraped something together from his paltry fridge selection. 

“Eat.” She had told him, and when he opened his mouth, “Eat, Sandor. I _forgive_ you.” 

A stronger man would’ve pushed the plate away and said _We need to talk_. 

But he had found that he was - _starving_ , Stranger! - and tucked into -

“You made me an omelet?” 

“I’m good at them.” 

“I didn’t even know we had eggs.” 

His voice had sounded like the inside of a thick wool sweater, so she had poured him a glass of water and told him to drink, and as he drained it her fingers had found his, underneath the blanket that she must’ve found in a closet somewhere, those infinite hours ago. 

“It’s okay,” She’d said, “Sandor, it’s going to be okay.” 

And he had known, then, that because it was Sansa, it would be. 

He has let Bronn into his apartment for the first time in weeks. He talks to Ray nearly every other day on the phone - except for when Sansa is there, which is most of the time - and tells him things too close to his soul to reveal. 

He used his cane, last Tuesday, without anyone having to tell him. 

They haven’t talked about it, yet. 

But he’s home from the store and she’s there at his counter, chopping thin slices of onion that he’s convinced are the reason he cries. Or asleep on his sofa at one in the morning when she’s in another tiff with her sister. She doesn’t look like she did, back then, in Washington. He remembered how the northerners rolled in, joking like the rest. They had called D.C ‘King’s Landing’, because even those hundreds of millions of miles away, there was an all-knowing man that they answered to, and he sat in an oval-shaped throne. Back then, when she looked, she would soon look away. But these days, when she meets his gaze, she holds it.

That’s not the part that scares him, either, but that’s the part that hurts. 

“I’m making soup.” She says, her elbows propped up on the counter, a knife held out like a smoke, “If that’s alright with you.”

“I don’t care what we bloody eat, girl.”

“Good,” She says, and her mouth twists around the words like his scars when he smiles, “Because I’ve invited some people.” 

“‘Some people’?” 

“Bronn. Arya. Tormund.” 

“So, all of my friends - and your sister?”

“She wants to make sure you won’t kill me.” 

“Ah.” 

“I told her not to worry, but -" 

“She’s Arya.”

“She’s Arya.” That she is. “It should be painless, though,” The little bird is saying, “I’ll lock up all the knifes before they come.” 

“Knowing your sister, she’ll be bringing her own.” 

“No,” She says, “These days, it’s just sticking out of Gendry’s back.” 

It throws him. He doesn’t _ask_ about Arya’s marriage - It really isn’t any of his business - but the girl is volatile, and he’d thought he would’ve heard if things were going wrong. They traveled long enough for him to know what the wolf bitch does to people when they get on her bad side. 

“What did he do?” He asks - and the next part throws him even more so that the walls are the ceiling and the ceiling the walls. 

“Nothing. It just - Isn’t working out. It does happen, sometimes.” 

“I thought that they loved each other.”

She puts the knife down on the counter and sighs. He hasn’t heard her sigh like that in years. The only time he had she hadn’t known that he was there, and he had held onto that like she’d held to his sweatshirt, as if could save him from - fuck, from himself. She sighs, 

“I thought so, too.” 

“What else do you think, little bird?” 

She’s facing him, now. 

“Why do you care what I think?”

“I don’t know.” He says, “But I do, so you might as well spill it.”

It’s the closest time that he’s come to discussing that night, and a shiver runs through her.

“I think that it’s selfish,” She admits, in the barest hint of a chirp, “That after everything I’ve been through, without having a choice, Arya’s leaving because she isn’t ‘happy’.” 

“She’s leaving him?”

“That’s what she says. And it’s like - I want her to be happy. She’s my sister, I want her to be happy. But I wanted to be happy too, once.”

“You could be, still.”

“Don’t lie to me.” She says, all hard and cold and northern, “Don’t you dare start lying to me now.” 

“I’m not lying, little bird.”

“You are,” She says. “You are, so would you _please_ just drop it.” 

She goes about her ‘duties’ then, chopping the onions and the carrots and fuck all what else, when it occurs to him he hasn’t asked her, yet.

“What kind?”

“Sandor-”

“Of soup. What kind of soup - Sansa.” 

“Chicken and dumpling.” 

“Do you want-”

“I’ll be fine.” 

The doorbell rings, and he says, 

“Okay.” 

And goes downstairs, cane in hand, to open the door up for Tyrion Lannister.

* 

“Well, that was a disaster.”

“Arya!” 

“It was - Don’t deny it. First of all, Clegane -”

“There is _nothing_ wrong with Sandor-”

“Except he wants to fuck you. Secondly-”

“No he _doesn’t._ ”

“Your husband shows up-”

“Ex-husband-”

“And come on, Sansa. Trust me, I know what that look means -”

“What _look_ , Arya, there wasn’t a _look_ -”

“The one that Sandor made at you all night. Yeah, that one - That one means ‘I wanna fuck’. You never annulled your marriage with Tyrion, by the way.”

“How the hell would you know?!” 

“I asked him. He’s nice. If you ask me you should try and work things out - his last wife was a whore, so having a lady would probably be good for him-”

“Oh, like you and Gendry are?”

She’s gone too far. She’s crossed the line.

But it wasn’t like nobody knew.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying, that’s a bit hypocritical of you.”

“And I’m just saying _fuck you_ , have fun _not_ staying at Winterfell.”

“I will.”

She believes it. There used to be a time that she wanted to be the head of the household, like their mother had been, but she was too young then to know about either her mother and the north, and it hardly seems worthwhile, after everything that’s happened. Arya, too, is Arya. They’ve never gotten on. In the back of her head, she knows they’re just excuses, but she can’t help but play through them now. The way that they used to fight. The fact that they’ve hated each other at least as long as they’ve loved each other. They were never the closest of siblings, in any sense of the word. But they want the same things. She can see that, standing here. They’ve always wanted the same things. To be respected. To be happy. To be - loved. 

Arya just didn’t need a middleman. 

That’s probably why her marriage is falling apart. These days, she fights with Gendry so often that she’s surprised he isn’t on her list. They fight about the kinds of things that all couples fight about - money and children and sex - only one of the partners is Arya, and Arya is incapable of ever backing down on anything. When they first married, they fucked so often that she’d run to Sandor’s house to get away from all the noise. Now she goes to get away from all the silence. 

“I’ll go live with Sandor,” She says, “I already have a key.”

“So I should tell Tyrion that you’re getting divorced?”

“Tell Tyrion to go back to Washington. I don’t want to see him again.” 

“Divorce it is.”

“I wonder if they’ll send our papers with yours.”

It’s unnecessarily cruel, but Arya started it, and wolves? Wolves never finish last. 

“I’m not going to miss you,” Arya says, “I hope that you drink yourself to death.”

“So do I.”

“I won’t invite Bran to the funeral.”

“He wouldn’t come if you did.” 

“Neither would Sandor.”

She’s gone too far. She’s crossed a line. She knows it.

“He loves you,” Arya says, “It would hurt him too much.”

“Maybe.”

“No. No, not maybe. I saw the look he gave you. I used to use that look on Gendry. Gendry used to use that look on me. You should go to him - but not because of me. You should go to him _because_ he loves you.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” She says, forgetting. “Arya-”

“What?”

“I hope that you’ll be happy.”

“I will be.” Says Arya. “You know me, Sansa. I make my own happiness.”

And when Arya says it, she remembers. Arya and Micah, shooting practice pistols by the river on a hot summer afternoon while she drank lemonade on the Lannister’s ranch-house porch. The howl Lady gave, that night her father shot her. 

“Be safe.” Says Arya. “And you let him know - You let him know that I _will_ kill him, if I need to, and that the only reason I haven’t is you love him, and I can’t let anyone you love be on my list.”

“I love you, Arya,” She says, and Arya smiles, as if she already knows that she’ll break the promise she just made. 

“I love you, too.”

She’ll never see her sister again.

She’s at Sandor’s when they find her, having a long talk. They do that, more and more. Talk about life. She coaxes him open like flower petals, and he holds her there like an elevator door. She hung herself on the balcony railing with one of Gendry’s ties. He was telling her about his mother when the call came through - vague memories of a woman who had hair as dark as his. 

“Arya’s dead,” Her brother had told her, succinctly. “I saw it last Wednesday. Come if you’re coming, I won’t be here for long.”

* 

“What else did you see?”

“Nothing.” 

The crypts of Winterfell are a sea of graves and stonework. At least the part that they can see. Bran doesn’t like going in too far. He says it clouds his vision. 

“Bullshit.” 

“You.”

“What about me?”

“You and him. Do you know his family’s history?”

“Like the back of my hand.”

“Liar. He hates liars.” 

“Yeah, well. I meant - about Arya. What else did you see about Arya?”

“Nothing important.”

“I would think that everything’s important,” She says, swallowing thickly, “Given the circumstances.”

“The loveless marriage, you mean? The -”

“The what?”

“You and him,” Says Bran, “Have you gotten serious yet?”

“Why?”

“I only wondered. It’s hard to keep the days straight. I can’t be sure.”

“Sure about what?”

“That the present isn’t the past. That the past isn’t the future. I’d been seeing it for months, Sansa, but I didn’t realize what it meant.”

She came up the road by herself, after. Sandor had offered to drive her - he had done other things, too - but she had shoved him off. She had needed to see for herself. True to his word, Bran had been there, waiting, when she came to the door. He had hugged her, stretching up in his wheelchair to reach, and it had felt like he felt things again. Things that were good; things that he didn’t know beforehand he would feel. They had come onto him like a jacket in winter, and shed like white seedlings in spring. 

They’d had a funeral; of course they’d had a funeral, and Gendry had sat in the front row of the sept, screaming until he got dragged out the back by security. The guard was friends with Arya - she forgets his name, now - and as the Septa who hadn’t known her sister read the eulogy, they could hear the sound of cracking bones and rending flesh outside. They had asked her to speak, but she hadn’t had anything to say. Or at any rate, not anything she hadn’t said to Arya. Bran had gone, though. Meera’d wheeled him up, and he had said that Arya was brave and fierce and funny, and good with a sword. He had said, when he was younger, that he’d wanted her to climb with him. He’d looked sickly in the lighting from the glass. The lighting in the crypt paints him starker, and Stark-er, too. He looks more like their father than she’s ever seen him. Pensive and honorable, and just a bit of something else. 

He looks like the kind of man who would pass a sentence. He looks like the kind of man who would shoot the gun. 

“I thought it was a dream,” He says. “They are, sometimes.”

“That doesn’t sound very helpful.”

“It’s not. But it’s easier to distinguish, usually. Usually, I’d know.”

“And you couldn’t this time?”

“I asked the raven. The raven didn’t say.” 

“I’m sorry.”

“That there’s too much future? Unless you made it that way, I don’t know what you’re apologizing for.”

“Too much future,” She says. Rolls around in, like a clover field, “There isn’t enough.” 

“Not when the decision’s made. But until then - before that - there is. Too much - potential. Anything could happen.”

“And then?”

“And then something does.”

“Something like Arya?”

“Something like anything. Those are the dreams. I see them because they’re the future, too, until they’re not. It’s what won’t be, what I can usually tell.”

“Give me an example.” 

She doesn’t know why she wants one. It won’t make her feel like she treated Arya decently, and she’s sick to death of Bran acting like a fucking prophet, like he’s the coming of the Father. But he sounds like Arya. Their voices are nearly the same. And she could use her sister’s voice, right about now. 

“I dreamed,” Says Bran, “That you left with him. At the Battle of Blackwater Bay, when the black water had turned green. He asked you to go and you went with him.”

“What happened then?”

Bran shakes his head. 

“It was only a dream. A part of the future that wasn’t.”

“Just answer the question. What happened then?”

Bran looks at her and she looks at Arya. Arya, rendered in stone, with a sharp, gleeful tint to her eyes. She’s wearing a crown of blue roses like their Aunt Lyanna’s statue. _They’re alike in spirit_ , their father had once said.

“Then,” He says, “They killed you.”

“Where?”

“At the Twins.”

“When?”

“With mother, and Robb.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“What would they have done to you? Who would you have been, if I had left with Sandor?”

Bran smiles. _There we are_ , he thinks, _I knew it_. She can read it in his eyes. 

“Myself.” He says. “I would’ve been the Three Eyed Raven.”

They fall into silence. 

“Will you be going back to him?” 

“What do you care?”

“I don’t.” He says, “But you haven’t spoken since the funeral. He misses you. He drinks.”

“Everybody drinks.”

“I don’t. It clouds my vision.”

“Everything clouds your vision.”

“You don’t. Being close to you reminds me.”

“Of what?”

“Father,” Bran says, “Falling. I had hoped it was a dream because I needed to forgive her, still. So did you. Do you?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Did you want to?”

“Does it matter? If it’s over than it’s over.”

“Not necessarily,” Bran says, cracking his pale knuckles in the dark. “Not if it’s a dream.”

“It’s over.” She says. “If it’s over than it’s over. That’s what it is.”

“You know,” Bran says, “I had one other dream like that. One where I couldn’t tell. I dreamed that you stayed, at the Blackwater. I dreamed that you came back here, one day, and fell in love with him. I dreamed that you loved him so deeply that you would’ve died; and that he loved you so deeply he would’ve thrown me off a roof.”

“Did he?”

“I always woke up at that part.”

“It sounds like a sad dream,” She says, and Bran is quick to cut her off-

“It wasn’t. Not for you.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve seen how I die,” He says, “It isn’t anything Sandor Clegane does.”

She isn’t shocked, though she rightfully should be. 

“That couldn’t have been pleasant. Seeing how you die.”

“It wasn’t.” He says, “But it’s the right way to die, all things considered. I’ve seen how you die, too.”

“And how would that be?”

“By letting it all be a dream.”

She feels like throwing up.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. It’s just that I never could tell. There were two endings - two dreams. One of them was, and one of them wasn’t, and in one of them, you died.”

“I don’t love him,” She says, tasting the lie, “I don’t _love him_ , Bran, why can’t you understand that?”

“Because I’ve seen that one, two, and it wasn’t a dream.”

It’s freezing down here. She hadn’t noticed, and now she has to ask,

“Are you going to stay?”

“You know that I can’t.”

“Why? Why couldn’t you just - stay here?”

“For the same reason that I couldn’t come, before. Because I won’t be. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to.”

“It should,” She says, “You broke your legs here, and - lost your sister. If I were you I couldn’t stand it.” 

Bran stares at her for a moment - a long, penetrating stare. It’s not as kind or as angry as Sandor’s. It sees her more. 

“You lost your sister, too.”

“It wasn’t the same.”

“Because I liked her?”

“I didn’t-”

“You loved her. That was more important. You did the right thing, leaving.”  
“She killed herself.”

“Yes,” He said, “But you did the right thing, for yourself. If you had stayed, she’d have taken you with her.” 

“You dreamed that too, didn’t you?”

He cocks his head. It cocks like the head of a raven; _nevermore_ , she tells it, _nevermore_. 

“I don’t dream,” Says Bran, “I’ve never dreamed. I just am.”

“I am, too.”

She says it timidly, and she wonders if he can tell that she doesn’t believe it, but he smiles. As if he feels… Happy. As if he hadn’t known that he’d feel happy, before, like he does. 

“I know you are,” He says, “But will you be?”

“I’ll try. Promise me something?”

Bran nods.

“If you ever see that I’m going to fail, promise that you’ll tell me?”

“I can’t.”

“Bran-"

“But I promise I’ll tell someone.”

And she thinks, in a perfect world, that that would be enough.

* 

Bran leaves on a Tuesday, and that Wednesday - a week after he saw, a week after he _knew_ , she signs the deed for Winterfell. She hadn’t meant to sign it; she had meant to buy a ticket for the closest Greyhound bus and pretend that she was running - but the pen had been in her hand, and the weirwood tree had begged her. She could still leave, she told herself, but she knew somehow that she wouldn’t. Not for awhile yet.

That Thursday, she had replaced the key on her necklace. She’d put Sandor’s in the junk drawer in their - her - kitchen, which boasted a less impressive accumulation of detritus, and then she had gone into her sister’s room for the first time since they left for King’s Landing. Arya would make fun of her, probably, for still calling it that, but that’s what it had been to them, and that’s what it still felt like. Gendry had left, using the bus money that she had handed him after slapping him full on the face, and it was her job, now, to clean. 

Her mother used to clean obsessively. Bran’s mother, too, she supposes, even though Bran feels more ghost than Stark most days. 

She takes the books down, first. She’d been right about _The Jungle Book_ , but she wouldn’t in a million years have guessed _The Tao of Pooh._ There are all seven Harry Potter books, and a post-it note on which Arya had written, in all caps, underlined, I AM NOT A SLYTHERIN after taking her first-ever _Pottermore_ quiz. She had gone on to learn how to manipulate the quiz into making her a Gryffindor, which, in Sansa’s opinion, was the strongest proof of Arya’s Slytherin identity than any other thing could be. _The Art of War._

There was a box in her closet where she kept all her letters from Syrio. She got the feeling he had taught her more than how to shoot when she was young; but Arya hadn’t ever talked about it. Whatever he told her, she leaves it. Maiden knows that the words weren’t meant for her. As for the closet - 

Gendry’d had the sense to clear everything he had, but it was still a hellhole. A hellhole that smelled like her sister, like fighting and bonding and bleeding men dry. Her ring was in her jewelry box; she had never really worn it; and her comb was stained from that summer she’d dyed her hair pink that Jon hadn’t let her live down. 

Jon.

They hadn’t told him, yet. Realistically, that responsibility fell to her, but she had abdicated it to Bran because a. He was the one who’d called her and b. She wouldn’t know what to say to Jon if they were talking about life, much less the death of the only person in their family who ever gave a shit about him. The truth was that she hadn’t wanted to tell him. There wasn’t cell service at the Wall, and she didn’t think she could face the north, alone. And so Jon, who had given Arya her first pistol, who shared more blood with Arya than Arya did with their whole entire family, had missed his sister’s funeral. And now he would spend the rest of his life never knowing. 

She wanted to feel bad about that. 

The first Sunday after Arya, she throws a garage sale. She does it because she cannot, _will not_ go to Sandor’s apartment, and Sandor doesn’t come to hers. It feels like a blessing. It feels like a sign. 

Bran does.

He’s wired up an umbrella to hook onto his chair, and he’s sipping on one of those absurd excuses for coffee that the local places sell. 

“Try a sip?”

“Fine.”

It is surprisingly good. It is, also, ninety nine point seven nine percent sugar.  
“Doesn’t this cloud your vision?”

Bran shrugs. 

“Does anything cloud your vision, or is that just something you say when you’re clueless?”

“It’s something I say,” He says, “When the three-eyed raven goes blind.”

She doesn’t know what to make of that, so she doesn’t try.

“Sandor isn’t here,” Bran says. “I looked.”

“I thought you were blind?”

“The three-eyed raven, Sansa. The three-eyed raven.”

“Had any visions of late?”

“Only one.”

“How was it?”

“Cold. Uncertain.”

“Tell me about it?”

If her sudden interests in his visions strike him as unusual, he doesn’t say a thing. “It was you,” He says, again. “Azor Ahai - But also, you.”

She had to give it to him: It was a more creative expletive than invoking the Seven. But it didn’t clue her in. She tries again. 

“Bran. What was the vision?”

“Frigid,” He says, “Freezing. It gave me frostbite; it took hours at the hearth to get warm.” 

“Was it-” 

“No.”

She swallows. She can hear it, over the footsteps and the murmurs and whoever she paid to watch the register. 

“Ok then,” She says, sounding, even to herself, much, _much_ too calm, “What do I have to do?”

“It isn’t certain. I told you that. But - I think that you need to go north.”

“You think… I need to go north. To tell Jon about Arya?”

“To do something. I think that it’s vital. And then I think - I think that you need to come home, and ask yourself a question.”

“I know the answer.”

“You’ve known it for months. But when you come home - ask.”

That night she packs and breaks her piggy bank. None of them ever knew where the piggy banks came from; just that they were there, and that their father pulled them aside at a very, very young age to explain to them that it was always better to save for a rainy day than cash in on an ill-advised impulse. It must’ve taken the most with her, because she’s never touched the thing, and, between that and the jar where she keeps all the loose change she’s found in the couch cushions, she has enough to get - 

A bus ticket to the next town over.

_It’ll have to do_ , she tells herself. And if it doesn’t - she won’t let herself think about that. It would lead too quickly to the fact that she doesn’t want to be doing this. Doesn’t want to have to look Jon in the eyes and say, instead of _I’m sorry for all the things that I said to you_ , that Arya is dead. 

She doesn’t want to tell _herself_ that Arya is dead. The only thing she wants to do is call Sandor and ask him to finish the stupid story he was telling her, that night the call came in. It was a fucked up story, but those were the kind that he liked to tell. The kind he thought might scare her off, but she had liked it. It had been a joy to get lost in his timbre, and she had cried, through him, for herself. For the childhood she’d lost. She wanted to know what happened because it was Sandor who was telling her. And she felt - safe - with him. As safe as one could feel, when they were near the Hound. She didn’t like to call him that, but he never let her forget that, at one point in her life, it was the only thing she’d known to call him by. She felt like he wouldn’t let her go unless she asked him to; wouldn’t let her stay unless she asked him to. 

She felt like he gave her a choice.

A bus ticket to the next town over, then. Or - Bran tells her,

“Ask Brienne.”

* 

Brienne still hates Danaerys Targaryen.

This is what projects, beneath all the layers of toughness and not missing Jaime. She feels guilty, asking her to do this, but the other woman hadn’t minded. She thinks that they could’ve had something in common, if she’d tried a little harder. Something that isn’t this. 

Hardness. Masks. Hiding.

Brienne’s all business, no talk, and she has a shot that could put most men to shame. Not Jaime, though. Not the sharpest assassin of their age. She drives the sort of pickup that would have an owner who thinks they own the road, but she drives it gently, as if she’s guiding a deer through the forest. There’s a dog kennel across the two back seats. 

It smells like Nymeria. 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” She had said, cooly, pulling up to Winterfell. Sansa hadn’t called her, in the end. Bran had, because he thought her ‘Greyhound-hitchhiking plan’ was an idiotic plan. She didn’t know what he’d told her. What she’d told him, except nicer, because Brienne of Tarth wasn’t his sister. 

“It’s okay,” She had said, even though it wasn’t, “It isn’t, but -”

“Life moves on.”

Brienne hadn’t talked to her, since that. She leans with her head in her arms and her arms on the rim of the window, like she had when they went down south. Occasionally, she takes a swig of water. 

It was going to be a long, long drive. But Brienne, inexplicably, was smiling. She wasn’t just taking a break from politics, she was taking a break from seeing her dead lover everywhere.

“Have you ever been north?” Brienne asks her, drawing her up through the well of her subconscious.

“Not farther than this. Winterfell is north enough for me. The Wall was always Jon’s true love.” Jon’s true love had been Danyaerys Targaryen, but that would be too harsh. “Have you?”

“I’m afraid that I haven’t.”

“Well,” She says, “I hope you brought a coat.”

“I remembered, after last time.”

Last time being Arya’s wedding.

When Arya thought she was in love. Or didn’t. Or - 

Whatever Arya thought. 

“Will I like it?” Brienne asks, to banish out the silence. 

“I don’t. You - might. It’s an acquired taste - the North. I grew up there, but -”

“Not like the Wall.” 

She doesn’t say it judgmentally, just factually, which it is. She _didn’t_ grow up at the Wall. None of them grew up at the Wall, except Bran, in his visions, and Jon, who went on purpose. She’s never even seen the place, though - 

“My husband went.” 

“Tyrion?”

“I saw him, the other night. Arya invited him to dinner, and I thought - There were so many things that he needed to hear. Things that I owed him. We should’ve at least talked about divorce, but - It didn’t come up. We just stared at each other across the table all night, like there was nothing we could say.” 

“That’s marriage,” Says Brienne, “It seemed like- That’s what I thought marriage would be.”

“Oh, so did I. My parents never - They loved each other, it was just a marriage kind of love. Faded.”

She knows that it makes her seem cynical. Pessimistic. Maybe she is pessimistic. But that’s how it had been with her parents. They loved each other resignedly, as if they had stopped fighting for each other, as if they were content being stuck in hibernation. There had been no longing looks across the great hall, no holding hands when they walked. There hadn’t even been any fighting; not after Bran was born. It was like it had gotten too much for them. Children. Life. Love. She tells this all to Brienne, and Brienne listens. Albeit, listens while paying attention to the road; she thinks she should be thankful for that. Her jaw tightens, and that is all.

“I’m sorry,” She says, “That’s all -"

“I don’t blame you for being scared of it.”

“You don’t?”

“Why should I, given everything?”

Everything being Arya. Arya’s wedding. Arya’s funeral. She makes a resolve.

“You shouldn’t, either. Be - afraid of love. I’m butchering this, aren’t I? I mean, none of us should be afraid of love. We should go for it. Right? You should just - go up to him and kiss him.” 

“Wouldn’t know what ‘him’ you’re referring to if I tried.”

“Tormund. Tormund Giantsbane, he’s one of Sandor’s friends, and _Sandor_ says that he talks about you constantly, and thinks that you got along really well at the wedding, since it was like - it was a date, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it a date? Wait. It was a date, wasn’t it-” 

“Sansa?”

“You should _go for it_ , you’d be a great mo- you’d be a great wife.” 

“How much?”

“I - Don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“Sansa.”

“I’m talking about Tormund. Tormund Giantsbane? He’s big - like, not as big as Sandor, but really big, and ginger. Did I mention he’s ginger? I think - I’ve never actually seen him. He’s one of Sandor’s friends. Did I mention that he’s one of Sandor’s friends? They’ve known each other for like, twenty fucking years, it’s crazy-”

She takes a swig of water. It burns. 

“Sansa,” Brienne says, “I think that you should put that down, now.”

“Oh. Oh - I forgot to - I’m so sorry. _Brienne_. Do you want some water?” 

“I want you to be okay,” Brienne says, and she wrinkles her nose in confusion.

“Why wouldn’t I be okay?”

Brienne will tell her on the way back home that Bran called Sandor and Sandor called her, and told her she should watch for it. _He wanted you safe_ , Brienne will tell her, _He only wanted you safe_. She’ll tell him he was right. She’ll think it herself, sometimes. She doesn’t think it then. 

She doesn’t think much of anything then, Brienne tells her, because she passed out five minutes after their conversation. She dreams, though, and in her dreams she thinks that she sees what Bran saw, through a pair of eyes not brown but blue. All the arguments that didn’t add up. All the smiles too confined. All the sadness that rose up like a wave to crush their sorry souls. The way that he was never there. How that bedroom was two bedrooms, split with a line through the middle, and on one side had been his life and on one side had been hers, but they were pieces from two separate puzzles. It wasn’t like that with Sandor. 

It wasn’t like that at the Wall. 

To start with, they didn’t have bedrooms, and to finish it, they didn’t have things to put in them. They had cells and thick furs, and they prayed they wouldn’t draw the night watch. 

_Strange, isn’t it?_ Uncle Benjen’d told them, on one of his many southward vacations _We’re the Night’s Watch, but we don’t want to watch at night._. It was a small consolation. He had most likely died in the daytime. 

She dreams of the end of the war.

How Danaerys had burned Washington like Gregor burned his brother’s face, with all the church bells ringing, mourning losses far less than their own. What she had done to Jon. What - Maiden, what Jon had done to her. He still had her blood on his hands, and then it had been chaos. Democracy had failed them, and so everyone who was anyone sat in chairs in the sweltering heat, and discussed whether it had been worth it or not. They held a vote amongst themselves - the people were too scattered, or too dead, to participate. And they came to the decision that noone among them was good enough to be sworn in. Before they’d decided this, however, they had offered the position to Bran, who had refused, and to Jon, who had said, tellingly, that he was afraid it was too soon for him. He had needed to get clean. He had needed to get away. He had needed, she recognized, to pay his penance for his crimes. It was like Arya had said. _Danaerys Targaryen may have killed all of King’s Landing, but Jon killed Danaerys Targaryen._. From the ashes of their failure rose the phoenix of Brienne, who had yelled at them so loudly the ground had shaken. She was sworn in the following month.

She dreams of waking up in Sandor’s apartment, with the smell of pancakes wafting in from the kitchen, and the feeling of strong arms around her; of kisses peppered down her neck. She dreams of seeing him, and she dreams of seeing the Wall in triptych formation, through one each of three raven’s eyes, until the facets coalesce. 

“Will you-”

“I’ll stay in the car.”

“Thank you. For driving me. It - It means a lot.”

Brienne suffers her a smile, a dancing, daring thing.

“Go see your brother,” She says, and Sansa doesn’t correct her. 

She is a Stark, after all.

* 

Her head is pounding, and there is no _Advil_ at the Wall.

“It’s not like WalMart,” Says one of the new boys - the kind who comes for honor and doesn’t realize that it isn’t what he’ll get. “We don’t get reshipments every week.”

The boys had mobbed her as soon as she came in, a throng of them, wide awake and clamoring to get a look at this strange woman with the fire-kissed hair who had come to them all the way from Winterfell. The youngest of them still remembered their mothers, and the ones who were just slightly older had jostled and vied for her attention.

“Is it true that you’re Jon Snow’s sister?” One of them had asked her, and, not knowing how to answer, she had told him, 

“Yes.”

She hadn’t known he’d kept his name, when he went back. She had thought that he might use his real one, especially if he was taking a leadership position. Aegon Targaryen just sounded more imposing somehow. But then, that wasn’t what it was about at the Wall, was it? There was no law here, except that once you got here you were northern, and the north runs on a loyalty economy. These boys - They never heard legends of Aegon Targaryen. They heard legends of Eddard Stark’s bastard.

“Can you show me to him?” She had asked him, next, and a blush and awe had taken him up by surprise. 

“Y - Yes, ma’am.” 

That drove a little laugh from her, and it shattered the tension in the room. She saw then that to the boys, she was as foreign and as frightening as the White Walkers, as unexpected and as unfamiliar as sunlight and heat. They were in awe of her - because she was a woman as equally as she was their leader’s…. Something. But they would laugh with her, she hoped. Stranger knows what else could get her through this dismal place.

“He’s feeding the ravens, miss.” The boy tells her, as they weave their way through the fighting yard to a library grander than Winterfell’s. She sees him, then. 

Jon, a mess of unruly curls and loose, contemplative limbs.

“You don’t need ravens, you know,” She says. “We have Bran for that, or had you forgotten?”

* 

Jon makes her toast.

“It’s plain,” He says, as if he’s daring her to argue. 

“That’s okay.”

If she were Arya, she would ask him, _Isn’t there butter or something?!_. But she isn’t Arya. She isn’t anyone much. She still can’t think of what to tell him, and she is saved by the bitter-tinged, 

“I’m kept apprised of what happens down south.”

“By who? And how?”

He glares at her. 

“It’s true that we don’t have _Verizon_ , but that doesn’t mean we’re hermits.”

She isn’t looking at him. She’s looking at the wall. There’s a sword mounted there - an honest to Seven _sword_ , with a snarling bear carved on the handle.

“Whose was it?” She asks him. 

“Mormont’s. It was meant to go to his son, but things didn’t work out.”

She laughs without meaning to laugh.

“Story of our lives since time immemorial. All of us except for you.”

He looks at her blankly. 

“Didn’t you know you wanted to join the Watch when you were seven?”

“You paid attention to me when I was seven?”

“There wasn’t much else for me to do.”

“Do you even remember me when I was seven?”

“You were my brother.”

He wasn’t, really. Not technically, either, though they hadn’t known that, then. She wants to say, _You’re still my brother, Jon_ , but there isn’t a point in it now. There’s a long moment of silence where she looks at the wolf sword, and thinks of the man it belongs to. Jorah Mormont. He was Danaerys’ top adviser, perhaps the closest person to her in the world. Now he’s just another corpse in the ground. He died, that awful night the Walkers stormed, and two days later the woman he loved was buried with him, though no one could have said she hadn’t earned it, razing King’s Landing as she had. 

All those women. All those kids.

It was a stupid, horrible thought, but when she thought about it she thought about her own childhood, swathed in furs and scoldings and other people’s miseries. She thought of how she had acted when she was a child, as if she were better than everyone else, and of how she had truly believed it. She had been a cruel, callous, petty excuse for a lady back then, and couldn’t say that she regretted having sacrificed her title, or her happiness. There was too little time in life, she’d found, to waste chasing something that she couldn’t have. And it was fine with her. It was her penance, for being the kind of girl who had never acknowledged inner beauty, and who had thought that love came in the shape of golden curls and eyes as green as leaves. She had paid for her folly, and she had paid for it dearly, but she couldn’t find it in herself to hate the things those men had done to her. It was life, and when it came to life, nothing came for free.

“Look at you,” She said, when the thoughts had run their course, “All Maesterly like Samwell. You’ve kept the Watch well.” 

“I do my best.”

She didn’t doubt it. It must be hell for Jon; the rumors, and the truths. She thinks of the boys, now. So young, and the young have a penchant for gossip. Their stares will follow them both through the halls.

“You have recruits,” She says, and Jon chuckles.

“It’s a miracle, isn’t it? We hadn’t thought anyone would want to join, after the wights got through. Turns out there’s always someone who doesn’t have enough to live for either way.”

“Orphans, then?”

“Or criminals. Same’s it’s always been.”

“Which were you?” 

It comes out harsher than she had wanted it too; years of prejudice pouring out her open wounds. 

“I was a bastard,” He says. 

“And then you were a king.”

“Could’ve been.” He says, “But the Night’s Watch needed me more.”

It wasn’t that; everyone knew. It was that Jon had needed the Watch. But no one said it. It was as taboo as talking of the war.

“The boys needed a father,” She muses, out loud, and Jon shakes his head. 

“I’m not a father. I’m not - I was never Mormont’s son.”

“You should ask the boys about that. They treat you like a father.”

“They treat me like a god.”

“What’s the difference?”

She asks him honestly, and he sizes her up. It’s been as long for him as it’s been for her - they don’t count the battle.

“Sansa,” He says, and she knows that he’s made up his mind, “Bran sent a raven out.”

“Then why didn’t you come? Was it because of the boys?”

“The Wall isn’t just something I can leave-”

“Arya would’ve wanted you to come.”

She hasn’t changed, has she? She is still so mean to him. Knowing that she does it doesn’t make her barbs less pointed. 

“You were her favorite.” She says, and her eyes go back to Mormont’s sword, “She was your favorite, and you couldn’t be bothered to even say goodbye to her.”

“Did you?”

“She didn’t want me to. You know how Arya was.”

“She saw who people really were.” 

“Yes. She never saw you as a bastard. I did, and - I was mistaken.” 

“I don’t-”

“I didn’t ask you to. Truth be told, I don’t even know why I’m here, but - Maiden, Mother and Crone, _Bran_ said he saw me come north in a vision.” 

“You take much stock in Bran’s visions?”

“They’ve never steered us wrong.”

“I’ve heard some say they let the Walkers in.”

“They were wrong. I’m sorry, but they were wrong. The Walkers came with winter, not because of Bran.” 

She doesn’t understand why she’s protecting him so vehemently. It’s not like Bran’s ever been anything but apathetic since his fall. But the guilty part of her stabs at her conscience and reminds her, _You’d never defend Jon like this_. She doesn’t think it’s wrong.

“If he did let the Walkers in -”

“He didn’t.”

“He ought to be put to death.” 

“You would say that about your own brother-”

“He’s not my brother, true.”

“It doesn’t matter! We were raised together, Jon! Sixteen years - Is that so easy to disregard?”

“For some people,” Jon says, “For you, maybe. But not for the north.”

“It’s in my breeding,” She says, baring her teeth on an impulse, “I have the south in me. Is that what you wanted to say? And if the north remembers, then you should remember too. You wouldn’t say such things about Arya.”

“Arya wasn’t -”

“What?”

He curses under his breath. It reminds her of - 

“We have so much rebuilding to do, and the journey is long.”

“Brienne got me here in a day.”

“We don’t have a day to lose. I wouldn’t expect you to understand, but the Walkers aren’t the only thing beyond the Wall. I would’ve come if I could’ve.” 

“For Arya,” She says, hating the accusation in her tone, “But not for Bran.”

“No,” Says Jon, “I would’ve stayed for Bran’s, too.”

“You want me to go.” 

“I wanted you not to have come, but that was too much to ask for.”

She stands to leave, and smooths down her throat.

“You do have my blood,” She says, as she leaves Jon Snow behind, “You said you would’ve stayed for Bran’s funeral.”

“What of it?”

“Nothing. Just what father used to say. The man who passes the sentence should be the one to swing the sword. You said you would’ve _stayed_.” 

“I would’ve,” Jon says, “Stayed. But I don’t think that you should.”

* 

He tells himself he doesn’t miss her. Then he calls Ray when he wakes up from yet another nightmare, and the closest thing he’s had to family tells him that they haven’t found her body in a storm ditch anywhere. He doesn’t know why Ray always knows that he dreams about Sansa, and he doesn’t particularly care to. It’s infuriating enough that it’s true.

He does ask, when things get so bad that he shakes on his feet and has to throw himself against his bedroom wall to keep standing, why he feels this way. It is a fraught question; fraught to be asking anyone, much less the Elder Brother, much less _himself_ , but he thinks it’ll help him. Only on the nights when he’s too pained, too distorted to remember nothing’s Sansa. 

Rumors has it that she fled after her sister’s funeral. Rumor likely has it right. She could barely be here before, and now? Rumor has it that Bran the Broken’s set to be the Stark in Winterfell, and that Sansa Stark’s gone south to change her name again. He can’t confirm the rumors, but he can’t deny them. It’s been four and a half months since he came into his apartment to find her there without asking. For them, it is practically eternity. At first he calmed himself with thoughts of her return - she would say she’d been in mourning, had had affairs to settle with the house, but that she was back now, and she wasn’t going anywhere - but there had come a day when he had known that Sansa Stark was gone; so he made himself forget the times they’d had, the words more intimate than the touch of a lover. 

And his life went on without her, as it had for years before. 

He worked. He wept. He drowned himself in the woes of Tormund’s love life, until the day when the redhead, shockingly drunk for a giant, had said, 

“Gods, Brienne won’t stop talking about how fucking sad she was.” 

“Who?” Asks Bronn, not looking at him. They’re fighting, at the moment. He hasn’t used his cane in weeks. 

“Fucking Stark girl she drove north.” 

Sandor’s head snaps up.

“Sansa?”

“You know any other Stark girls, Hound? Said she was’s drunk in the car as a man when he’s out for his life. Told her a lotta shit about King’s Landing, and that we should get together.” He paused to take another mighty chug of ale, “Can’t say I’m sorry for the last. Anyways, she’d called for to get to her cousin, up at the Wall, and Brienne said she wouldn’t come down none. Gave her forty for gas money and sent her off. She’s stark raving mad - no pun intended.” 

“It wouldn’t surprise me.” This being Bronn, “Considering.” 

“Considering?”

He didn’t realize he had spoken, and certainly not that he had spoken so loudly, but Bronn trains his gaze on him anyway. 

“Considering how absolutely fucking horrendous her life’s been, is anyone shocked that she has a few screws loose?”

“She doesn’t.” Every pair of eyes in the party sharpens on him instantly. “She doesn’t have any screws loose. For fuck’s sake, can’t anyone leave well enough alone?” 

Tormund goes to say something, but Bronn stills him with a hand on his wrist and a creeping, fog-like sadness that descends on his visage. Damn right, too. He’s not in the mood for Giantsbane’s _sorry-not-sorry’s_ at the moment. Not when - 

“Where’s your giant lady live?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Brienne. Your giant lady. Where the fuck does she live?”

“You want to talk to Brienne?” 

“Yes I want to fucking talk to her.”

“Sandor-”

“Because she’s a goddamn _fucking_ liar, that’s why!” 

The pub is in silence. It’s louder than when he tried to choke her. Louder than those terrible, eternal seconds after he stopped screaming but before he passed out, when he looked into his sister’s face with only half of one. Louder than the way she’d - 

He promised himself he wouldn’t tell this story. 

But it hadn’t been a promise he could make.

“Okay,” Bronn says, “Alright, Tormund, call your girl up.”

His voice brooked no argument. Sandor remembered when his voice used to be like that, but it had been his face more than anything. It had been, more than anything, his scars. 

He couldn’t save her, then.

Not when her father cut her direwolf’s neck in the barn behind the stables. Not when Meryn Trant beat her bloody and the boy president laughed. Not when Littlefinger married her to Ramsay Bolton.

Winterfell never could, either. 

The house was always too bloody big for her. Too empty, too silent, too full up of screams. And so he knew that it was selfish of him, wishing that she’d stayed. But he found he couldn’t help it - he hadn’t been able to save her then, but he hoped he might’ve done. 

Brienne tells him that she wouldn’t come home. That was what she’d said. _She wouldn’t come home_. He had fought the urge to snarl at her, _Winterfell isn’t her home_ , but decided against it. She was Bronn’s woman, and she was Brienne of Tarth. He respected her for that. 

She said that Sansa’s stayed at the Wall, with whatever Jon was to her, now. Some curious mix between brother, bastard, cousin, and all that was left. He wondered what the green boys thought of her; that she was beautiful, and mysterious, and kind. He wondered if she’d let herself become the mother that they’d never had. A mother in place of her own. He wondered if he shouldn’t drive himself up there tomorrow, to the edge of the world, where cold and frigid blend together like a watercolor painting, but he knew that it wouldn’t be right. 

She’d told him, when he asked her, that the little bird hadn’t been wearing his key.

* 

The boys were dressed for winter. Their cloaks were patchwork, so she begged Jon’s coin for soft fur to sew in the linings.

“You’re mothering them,” He said, as if he hadn’t thought she’d do it.

“Somebody needs to.” 

She presented them the cloaks the first full moon of her stay, and just like that, as if she hadn’t been already, she became the most important person in the Watch.  
Her duties, as far as she could tell, was to do anything and everything in her power to make the place habitable. She set to it with a vigor that her life had been lacking; and she did it by talking with the boys.

“You’re good for them,” Jon tells her, a month or two into her stay, “They really trust you, Sansa.”

In the space of those two months, they had. They had come to her with the usual things, the ones they would’ve told their mothers. Some of them had nightmares; she made them hot milk with honey and cinnamon and listened to them talk. She let them say what they would to her, and no matter the horror that lurked in their words, she told them it would be alright. 

But she wished she could tell it to Sandor. 

She dreams of him now almost every night. He would make the cold nights hot again, and she could curl up to him like a furnace, a furnace with scars and flaws and gentle harshness, who would lick the tears right off her cheeks and call her by her name. She thinks that she could trust him not to kill her, if she asked. And in the meantime, she will love the boys, in the way that boys ought to be loved. She will give them all the love that she would give her own children, if she had ever had them. 

A mother, in place of his own. 

And Winterfell will carry on without her. The house will molder, and the cobwebs will stretch their fingers across archways and halls. Moths will eat the gray-spun curtains. The roof will leak and the books in her bedroom will mildew; her father’s words will blanch from the air. 

In a hundred years, the house will be a corpse, as dead as her parents and Arya, and she’ll like it better that way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One week, and one chapter, left!
> 
> In place of influences/references for this chapter, the songs that I listened to while writing this, in case anyone wants to get in on my mindscape while I was putting this chapter together. 
> 
> \- ' _Rasputin_ ' by the Ayoub Sisters(Not the original, I know, but much more fitting and also violin.) 
> 
> \- ' _The Toad Lickers_ ' by Thomas Dolby and Imogen Heap
> 
> \- ' _Behe Chala_ ' by Shashwat Sachdev and Yasser Desai 
> 
> \- ' _Best Part of Me (feat. YEBBA)_ ' by Ed Sheeran. 
> 
> Feel free to leave any critiques/thoughts in the comments below, and I'll see you next week for the conclusion of _There Are Always_!


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's over.  
> Guys.  
> It's _over_.  
> I want you all to know that I meant to get this out on time, and then school started. But I tried to get this done and edited as soon as I could and could I mention? I _love_ this chapter, and I'm going to _miss_ this story. Thank you all for sticking with me despite my mistakes and for showing support and love to this work, and please, please enjoy the last chapter of _There Are Always_ \- wherein I steal the summary format from _Howl's Moving Castle_ , revelations are made, and a wedding's attended, again!

Asleep, and dreaming; there are fingers on his scars.

*

It’s been seven months since the wolf-girl died, and she’s knocking at his door.

“Do you love me?” She asks him. Her hair’s been cut and her eyes are hollow. The sheen of sweat on her skin does nothing to mask its emaciated pallor. 

_Well fuck_ , he thinks to himself. And he tells her,

“Sit.” 

She sits.

He busies himself in the kitchen for a moment, so he doesn’t have to look at her, and comes back with some type of excuse for a sandwich. 

“Eat.”

“Sandor-”

“Christ’s sake, you look like a White fucking Walker. Eat, will you?” 

She eats, and he watches her, and pretends that she hasn’t been gone for what seems like half his fucking life. Then she is done, and looking back up at him, and - 

“I don’t know what you want from me,” He says, slowly, to her expectant, burning gaze, “But you’d best go looking somewhere else.” 

“No,” She says. It takes him aback. She looks so weak, right now - weaker than she’d been at her lowest in Washington - but she sounds like a sunflower. Like a weather-worn diamond that’s not lost any edges. “Sandor, I - _please_.” 

It takes but a second, and then she’s wrapped herself up in his arms. Or was that his fault, for putting them ‘round her, the minute he guessed her intentions. She’s too warm, he thinks, being as thin as she is; she’s soaking in a southern summer heat. And she - Seven, she wants him to feel it, because she isn’t letting go. Her tears are like saltwater; the more she cries them, the more they escape her. “I’m sorry,” She’s saying, “I left you, I’m sorry, I’m so _sorry_.” 

And, 

“It’s okay, little bird, it’s okay.”

But it isn’t. He can tell as much without looking. Whatever happened to Sansa - because something, he knows, did - she needs him more than ever now. And Sandor Clegane’s not the kind of man who can cope with being needed. So sooner than he knows she’d like her to, he’s pushing her up and off of his lap, sliding his torso away from her small, dainty hands. Hands that aren’t like his; hands that haven’t killed men. Best she’d go looking somewhere else, indeed.

He isn’t holding her, now, and he can see her slight frame better. Might be that it’s wolf-girl, but she hasn’t looked this small in years. Small enough that he’s willing to try for her, over a beer or two. It couldn’t hurt anything. 

That she makes it to the table and not to his bed is a miracle. 

“So,” He asks her, cooly, “Why don’t you start from the beginning.”

It isn’t a question, and the answer, when it comes, isn’t one either.

“I can’t.” She says, “Sandor, I’m sorry, but I _can’t_.” 

“You’re right, little bird.” He says, taking a sip, shaking his head, “You can’t. Can’t come in here, looking like that, without some sort of explanation.”

“S-Sandor.” 

She’s about to cry, again, but he finds he doesn’t care. No, that’s not it. It’s just that all his caring’s buried under all his anger, and there’s plenty of that to go around with her and then some. 

“You’d best get chirping,” He says, “I don’t have all day.”

(This is a lie. _A hound will never lie for you,_ he'd told her once, and here he is, lying. The only plans he’d had today were dinner with Bronn to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of ‘We’ve-all-lived-but-we-wish-we’d-died’. _A hound will never lie to you,_ he’d told her, but he sure as hell won’t be telling her that.)

“From the beginning?” She asks, and he nods at her, a barely perceptible nod. “You were there,” She says, “For most of it.”

“Not that beginning, girl.” He growls, and she laughs, if you could call it that.

“You used to call me Sansa.” 

“You used to call me ‘ser’” He says, “And I was never one of those.” 

“You were,” She says. “You were.”

“Oh, save your fucking courtesies.”

“From the beginning?” She asks.

“That’s what I asked for.”

“From the beginning,” She says, to nobody, not even herself, “From the beginning, it was hell.”

* 

From her rooms, she used to watch him shoot his gun. Joffrey had introduced him as his bodyguard - his big, scary, helping-me-form-a-dictatorship bodyguard, and he wore the scars that swept across his face like her brother wore his wheelchair; like her mother wore her constant disappointment.

It had been weeks since he’d so much as talked to her, but she remembered the way his eyes softened, avoided, when she was stripped to her knickers and beaten, beaten, _beaten_ , so fierce and so long that she feared she’d forgotten her name. It would be the first of many times that Joffrey had it ordered; and it would be the first of many times that Sandor Clegane saved her, without either of them really knowing why. 

In the south, the days were hot and endless, and Joffrey kept her on his arm. He was her Lady, he said; because those were the words that he knew would make her fall. He wanted her there with him. It was always ‘he wanted her there with him.’ When they had dinner with foreign ambassadors, he wanted her there with him. When he introduced a new policy, he wanted her there with him. When he burned the Constitution as his mother looked on, he wanted her there with him. And it shouldn’t have mattered that much to her, back when it first started, that he wanted her there with him, except. He _wanted_ her. He _loved_ her. He said she was his _lady_. 

Then queen Cersei had her Lady killed, and Joff showed his penchant for ripping her clothes off. 

That was when everything changed; though in hindsight, she recognizes that nothing really had. Joffrey had always been that boy who loved inflicting pain, and his mother had always been that callous bitch who only thought of herself and her own. When things changed - honestly _changed_ was when the war had ended. 

At Winterfell, the years that preceded its end were filled with fire-smoke and rumors of Targaryen dragons. She hadn’t known if they were true or not. Winterfell wasn’t her haven; it was her holdfast, and its’ people weren’t her people. She didn’t listen to them talk. But then Danaerys burned King’s Landing, and broke her brother’s heart. And even though they’d never really liked each other, it had set her Stark blood boiling. 

Family was all they’d left, and precious little of it. 

There was Bran, with his visions and his ignoring them, and Arya, who didn’t ignore them but might as well have, and Jon, who wasn’t even technically their brother. But at that point? She would take anyone with any Stark in them; hold them, as close as they could get. So when Jon came, with Danaerys, even if it was clear Danaerys hated her - 

She tried to take him. To hold him close to her, as close as he could get, and he said he had a life to get on with. He said he had Danaerys, now. He also said it wasn’t personal, but she knew that was a lie. _You need to get laid_ , Arya had told her, _That’s what me and Gendry do_.

Everybody had somebody, and Sansa had no one but herself.

And she just -

Wondered, more often than not, if it was wrong that she wanted somebody. She wondered it so often that she started to ask it to herself, over a glass or two or three of wine, and then to the men at the bar with her. Most of the time, she couldn’t point them out in a picture afterwards. But for a moment - for a night - they made her feel like she was almost half a person. And for awhile, it would work for her. And then she’d remember that Ramsay and Joffrey had both made her feel like almost half a person, every now and then; and all those years ago, in Washington, Cersei Lannister had taught her how to drink vodka in her lemonade. So what if she stopped going for the men, and kept on going for the liquor? It wasn’t like there was anyone to stop her. 

It wasn’t like she had a family, anymore. 

Occasionally, she would get word from Jon, or from Arya, but the news was the same. Arya was the Lady of Winterfell, Jon was at the Wall, and Bran had taken a shine to the tabloids. She didn’t ever question it; usually, she was too far drunk for that. But when she did stop to reflect; to honestly _think_ about what had happened to them all, she couldn’t escape the feeling that they had never really been a family to begin with. The only thing that had ever tied them together was a name. She and Arya - they had fought horribly as children, and hadn’t everybody joked that they weren’t really sisters? Bran was off climbing some tower all the time, and he had been too shy as a boy anyways to make any kind of comment during mealtime. Jon wasn’t even their brother. 

Everyone else was dead, but she thought about them, too. 

Her father, Ned, the most honorable man in the world, who kept his sister’s secret to the grave, despite the fact that it cost him the love in his marriage. Her mother, Catelyn, whose happiness had dried like a riverbed, who saw her children as her greatest joys and her greatest failures. Rob, the boy general, too young to go to war; and Rickon. Wild, wild Rickon, more direwolf than boy. She wondered what they would think of the eldest Stark, and decided that they would think the truth. That she was, to be honest, fucking pathetic of late.

It was the kind of sentiment that made her want to drink.

For a long time, she thought that everything was better when she drank. Then the drink would wear off, or she would run into someone who had only ever known her sober, and flail, grasping into nothingness to try and find something to say to them. That was what undid her, in the end. Grasping into nothingness, the word she’d found was ‘yes’, and the person that she gave it to was Arya, on the other end of a payphone, asking her to come plan her wedding at Winterfell.

It got easier, after that, to pretend she wasn’t Sansa. She could throw herself into something, and ignore the burning, spasming longing that ripped at her lungs and her ribcage. Throw herself into it, not expecting anything from the world or herself; or from anyone. For the most part, it had worked. 

And then she had remembered him, like a child remembers a nightmare, or that time that they ate seven hot dogs, a giant cotton candy cone, and guzzled a liter of _Mountain Dew_ at the fairground. Those glorious moments of pure, sugar-fueled elation before they hurled out the entirety of their stomachs on the shit-streaked fairgound dirt, lining included, with no one to hold back their hair. Like getting drunk, before the hangover. Like getting drunk. 

She had remembered him, and she had remembered there were things she hadn’t said, and she’d thrown all her caution and protection out the window, and for what? For the hope that he might greet her like a lover? That was never what they were. _Hell, girl_ , he would say - and she can hear him saying it now - _You think that loving’s something that I do? Little bird, you don’t know me._. 

And perhaps - just perhaps - when it came to that, Sandor was right. Oh, she hated to admit it to herself, but she had never been the smart one. She had been the one who looked out the window for Joffrey, with his crown of golden curls, who didn’t wear sunscreen because she wanted to soak in Washington, who thought that necromancy was sewing Cersei Lannister drapes. She hadn’t known the first thing about politics, either. Only that she would turn 18 and vote, for whoever Joffrey told her to.

Men. 

That was what she’d thought she’d known, back then, for growing up in a household with four brothers, but in the end it wasn’t true. The men that she’d known weren’t monsters. The men that she’d known hadn’t been hounds. 

He told her to start where it started, but even she doesn’t know.

So she tells him,

“You sat with me.”

“Next to you.”

“No. _With_ me.”Because she may not know men; mayn’t know them either way, but she has _memorized_ Sandor Clegane. “If you weren’t with me, you wouldn’t have been with me. I remember that much.”

“Small miracle.” He bites, and looks down for it, as if he were ashamed.

“You weren’t even nice to me,” She says, “That night. You were yourself. And I had forgotten that was something I could be. I had forgotten there was such a person, up inside my mind. All of the people that I’d died to live for - it was like you killed them. Cut off their heads with a swipe of your cane.”

“I’m not your bloody bodyguard, girl. I’m not your bloody savior.”

“No,” She says, “But you were. And I didn’t even thank you.”

“Nothing to thank me for-”

“There is, though. You - You gave me back my _life_.”

“And?” He says, “How is it, being Sansa Stark?”

“Lonely. Maudlin. Predictable.”

“You fuck off to the Wall for who knows how long and show up in the middle of the night looking like the Night King stabbed you, and you tell me it’s _predictable?_ ”

“Who else would I have gone to?”

“Stranger’s sake-”

“Who else would I have gone to, Sandor, now that all my family’s dead?”

“You were with your family.”

“Jon, you mean?”

“That what they’re calling him, yet?”

“Yes. He didn’t want to change his name. It wouldn’t have been faithful.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“That’s the North. But you don't get it. Jon isn’t my family, Sandor. Neither him nor I are disillusioned on that score.”

“I thought that you were raised together?”

“Yes,” She says, “But I was cruel to him. I was… close…. To my mother as a girl, and my mother had ideas about Jon that couldn’t be shaken. I was awfully unfair to him; I treated him, sometimes, like Joffrey treated commoners.” At this she shakes her head, “And those wounds are too old, by now, to heal.”

“Why’d you go, then?”

“Bran said that he’d seen me there.”

“Bran,” He says, and she can see him, drawing up the memories, “That the wheelchair boy?”

“These days, he goes by Three Eyed Raven.”

“The fuck is that?”

“Bran,” She says, “Apparently.”

“I had heard of the visions,” Sandor says, “But fuck all else.”

“You know,” She says, barely containing her laughter, “That’s something Bran would see.”

They lapse into a seething silence, and she yearns to reassure him; so she reaches out and drowns her palm in the ocean of his palm, trails it up the desert of his scar-scabbed arm without armor. 

“I don’t listen to Bran,” She tells him, “Usually. But he saw what happened to Arya; and he saw how Jon was born. He’s never lied, before.”

“Like a dog, that way,” He says, “Your brother.”

“Like the kind of man that deserves to be listened to, if nothing else. He said that I’d go north, so I went north. And I think -”

“Go on.”

“I think I was born in the wrong north. Because everything about that place - It felt like home in the worst way that it could. Cold, like I’d always heard about the north. Not numb, like Winterfell, but truly, honestly cold. Harsh, the kind that can’t be covered. At the Wall, I could understand my kindred’s distrust of the outsider world; it really was that foreign.”

“Then why did you leave?”

“I don’t know,” She says, and sighs, “I think… I think that I thought that it wasn’t my home.” 

“Where is that, then, girl?”

It’s here. She already knows that it’s here. Here, with him, and his sewing kit and his shame-shadowed stranglings. Here, where she is safe, because if anybody tried to hurt her, Sandor Clegane would kill them. Where even Tyrion could not make her run away. 

“Winterfell,” She says, and every word melts one half of her face, “Winterfell is my home.” 

“Well then, little bird.” He says, “Fly away home.”

*

Home is a mask without a bandit. Home is a house without a hall. She spends the first day making telephone calls, on their father’s ancient rotary. As children, they had made a game of speed-dialing, racing with fingers, sliding, and clicks. It shouldn’t be on the grid, it’s so old; but that was the way their father’d liked it. _There must always be a Stark in Winterfell_ , he’d said, _And there must always be a rotary phone_.

As they grew, they’d all acclimated or veered left. Arya, famously, would answer the phone then call back on her cell. Bran, after the fall, would recite yet-to-be conversations word for word. Sansa alone had done the right thing; answered with a smile and a Winterfell, Sansa Stark speaking. Who is this? Just the way that her mother had taught her. Propriety was the height of their heritage; the pinnacle of their poise. She called anyone and everyone she could think of who could possibly be of use to Winterfell, and then, out of spite, sorrow, and knocking over the _Post-It_ note on accident while rooting through his fridge,

“Bronn? Bronn Blackwater? I, um… It’s Sansa. Fuck, you knew that - Sorry, that sounded like him… Shit. I’m sorry, um - I’ll go-” 

“Nah, it’s alright. Sandor said that you got back in town.”

“Already? I haven’t been back for a week.”

“Long enough,” Says Bronn, “To fucking break his heart.”

“My apologies,” She says, for true, now, and steels herself to hang up, “I hadn’t known that he was so interested in seeing me. I was only calling to ask if I might return my apartment key. I thought that you would be a safer bet - As you said,” And here she wills her voice not to crack like Rickon’s would have, had he aged, “I broke his heart, and I shouldn’t think he’d want to see me, anymore.” 

“You have a fair point,” Bronn says, “On that.”

“You don’t sound angry.”

“I can speak honestly with you?” 

“I should think you’ve earned that right.”

“I’m not going to waste my anger on a girl who didn’t care enough to love him. Sandor needs me to be his voice of reason, not his voice of vengeance.”

“Well,” She says, and her voice does crack, this tie, “You - um - you have a fair point on that.”

She swears that Bronn starts judging her, across the phone. But to her surprise - and shock, and elation, and a thousand other things she’ll think of later - he is kind when he suggests, 

“Would you like to meet up for a coffee-and-key-return? Get you out of that house, I would think - too many damn ghosts.”

And she knows, then, what she might have suspected. That he was there all the while. That he was one of the men who had come to pack Arya’s things up in crates. 

“Did Sandor put you up to it?” She asks, a fainter sleight of hand. 

“Later,” Bronn says, “Coffee.” 

Later, then, indeed.

* 

Later, at a newspaper stand turned hot dog joint turned ‘no sleeves and try not to get burned’ handout coffee receptacle, Bronn Blackwater ignores the vender’s advice. He swears - because Sandor must have learned it from somewhere - and she goes on a hunt to find cold water, before he pauses her with a shake of the head.

“I’m sorry,” He said, “You’re a highborn lady, you were expecting better than this out of me. Sansa.” And here he extends his hand for a firmer handshake than she’s ever received - Sandor never shook her hand. _You know who I am by now, girl. Hands or mouth, it doesn’t matter. Take your chirping somewhere else_. - Which she finds to be pleasantly pleasant.

“Bronn. You - um-” 

“Keys?” 

“Yes. Only one, not - um - to the front door.”

“He had them changed, actually.” 

“Oh.” 

“But I’m sure he’d still appreciate having these ones back. He can be - _paranoid_ , when he gets in the mood.”

“You wouldn’t say?”

Bronn laughs.

“I’ve only known him for thirty-so years.”

Longer than she has, then, but that’s to be expected. Still, her curiosity blazes, and -

“How did you meet?”

“Ah,” he says, “That’s too long a story to get into.”

“Do you have work or something?”

“No. Just - this is Sandor we’re talking about. He wouldn’t like it if I told you.”  
“If I asked him,” She asks him, “Would he tell me?”

“With the way that you’ve treated him? Probably not.” 

“So - That’s why I’m not asking him. He doesn’t talk about his past, and - I think that that hurt us, maybe.”

“Look,” Bronn says, and she can sense when he sheds his persona, “If you’ve come here to give me the keys, you’ve given me the keys. If you’ve come to get into a bullshit discussion about what’s hurting Sandor, when you _know_ that the answer is you, then you can leave anytime.”

His arms are crossed, in a distinctly Sandor-like motion, and his eyebrows are raised and incredulous. She forces herself to swallow.

“You misunderstand me.”

“Mm?”

“I was only suggesting that Sandor had a part in things as well, not that mine was insignificant.”

“And what part did Sandor have in it?”

“Secrecy.” She says, honestly, “The secrecy that he sheathes himself in, and the secrecy which he instilled in me.” 

“Sandor-”

“Please.” She says, because, after all, two can play at this game, “You know enough about our pasts, I would think, to know that he was - present - for a large portion of my youth. Whatever he felt for me then, he chose to teach me lessons that distanced me from him. Some part of this - my part, yes, but his part, too - is a natural result of that distance.” 

Bronn looks - impressed. Mad, the maddest she’s yet seem him, but impressed. She barks out a laugh at that, then goes to cover her face with her hand as it heats with a blush, then drops it.

“Sorry,” She says, “I just - most people assume that because I’m a _highborn lady_ , I couldn’t piece together the world for my maidenhead.” Bronn blanches slightly, then recovers, and she smirks, “Or be crass, or learned, or fierce.”

“You’ve proven them wrong,” He begrudgingly admits. 

“I should hope so. I’ve only survived this entire damned war.” 

“That you did,” Says Bronn, “And - If I’m hearing you correctly…”

“By all means.”

“You think that that’s because of Sandor. You believe that he enabled you to survive your - hardships - but in doing so, drove a wedge between the two of you?”

“Not precisely,” She says, and Bronn motions for her to continue, “More so between me and myself. Me and my - well, me and my emotions. I have a hard time dealing with those, because of what I’ve learned from Sandor.” 

“Ah,” Says Bronn, grasping the thread, “And those issues were partly responsible for your actions towards him.”

“Yes.”

“But you acknowledge that they were, in fact, _your_ actions?”

“I - I do.”

“Then it seems a bit rich that you would be worried about who’s to blame for them. Oh, sure - you can’t hurt him more than you already have, _little bird-_ ”

“How-”

“He talks about you in his sleep.”

She looks down, now. To where her hands are wrapped around the coffee; and as she slips into a memory his hands are her hands and her hands are the coffee. _Sansa Stark_ , her mother would have said, _you ought to be ashamed of yourself_. 

_And I am, mother, I am, but that doesn’t_ change _anything._

“Sandor - He um - he used to think that I was too polite. Said that I was ‘chirping all the time’.”

“Just like that, I would imagine.”

“I hear him saying it, though,” She presses, “All the time, even when he isn’t there. I hear him say a lot of things to me, and - It’s strange, is all. Everybody has a voice inside their head, watching out for them, telling them when to be smart, and somehow, for me, that voice became Sandor. It was all that I could do to stand next to him sometimes, knowing that his voice was the only thing that had kept me alive.” 

“So you killed him, instead.”

Her eyes snap to him. 

“Relax, Stark. I didn’t mean it literally. It just - Yeah, I’ve known the guy for a long, long time, and - he really does care about you. You might be - and don’t tell him I told you this - but you might be the _only_ thing he cares about.”

“What about his killing?”

“Harder to kill,” Bronn says, “When you’ve lost a working leg.”

“And a job,” She says, “And an employer.” 

“It was Joffrey,” Bronn remarks dryly, “I would think you of all people would be thankful that he’s not around.”

“No,” She says, “I am. Just - it threw a wrench in his life, I’m sure.”

“How would you know?”

She shrugs.

“He told me, once - _killing is the sweetest thing there is_. I just wonder what he did without it.” 

“He found something else that he could live for. And then she broke his heart.”

“Why did you meet me?”

“Because I think that you needed to know that. I - ah - I don't like you, Sansa, but that isn't why I came. I came because - Honestly? I don’t give a fuck what you think Sandor did to deserve this. I know him, and he doesn’t. You were right about one thing; he does distance himself, from everyone, and everything. And now I think that I know why.”

“You hadn’t known before?” She says, scrambling backwards over the slanting cement, “In over thirty years, you didn’t know?”

“In over thirty years,” Says Bronn, so frankly that it reopens the cut on her lip, “Nobody ever proved it.”

* 

_I think that you should talk to him._

 _I think that you should say you’re sorry._

_You know, if you are._.

It’s late when she gets back home; she hadn’t gone right away. After Bronn left, she had wandered the streets for awhile, from the seedy alley where she met him and smoked to the bars that he went to and drank, to the church where her sister got married and the veterinary clinic where they all took the direwolf pups - a lifetime, an era, ago. 

When her parents and her siblings and her children had been alive - albeit, in the last one’s case, an ill-fated fairytale dream. When it was alright for her to be cruel to Jon because at least there was everybody else; and when she didn’t think twice about fighting with Arya; it wasn’t like there would ever be a time, someday, she couldn’t. Bran was the one who’d found the pups - poor, sweet, still-human Bran, who could cry for such thing as a pup without its mother - and Jon, Jon who she had always hated, who begged their lord father to keep them. 

_Lady,_ she thought, as she stared at the frosted glass doors. _Lady. I think that you should -_ Lady shouldn’t be dead. Lady should be alive somewhere, in a dog bed in a cozy little house with a blanket, warm and safe and fucking _loved_. Lady shouldn’t be dead because of Cersei Lannister, but then again, who among them should have been? 

Not Lady. Not Rickon. Not Arya.

She had hugged the side of the building and it took her ‘round back, where she could hear the whir of electrical fans, a cacophony of barber-shop razors. She could see him there - their father, and a girl who wasn’t their mother cut his hair. _Hold still_ , she would tell him, as wild-eyed as any sister _Or it_ will _hurt_. She hadn’t talked about her aunt Lyanna since he died, but she remembered that story. _Find someone who loves you like a sister’d want you to be loved_ , their father’d told her, _and you’ll never want for a day of your life_. 

And now everything was different, and nothing was the same.

She didn’t think about her father. Not even ‘when she could help it’, just…

He was the one person - the _one_ person - who she thinks, sometimes, might have been proud of her, if he had lived to see her grown. Proud to see that she - Something. Proud because he was the only man that she could never disappoint, even if she ran away a million times. Proud because he was her _father_ , and that was the man that he was.

Proud.

Maybe, if her father hadn’t died, she would never have been so ashamed of herself. Maybe, if her father was alive, she might not have had to turn to empty nights and Arya and Sandor Clegane, acting like he almost understood the first thing about her. When he was the one who’d tried to take her choice away, time after time after time. _Little bird_ , he had said, and stepped into her rooms, and she had known she was going to die, _Up, girl, the king wants to see you_. He had said and then she’d been with Joffrey - _the boy-king_ , he asked to be called - with Joffrey; with the sneer of Meryn Trant.

That was the future he’d given her.

And all those nights long past the battle, when she lay in a bed that would never be hers with her hands between her legs and his sweatshirt draped over her chest.

That was the future he’d taken.

His key; his stupid fucking key he didn’t need. That was what she thought about, as she rounded the twisted, mangled streets of the capital. Bronn was probably giving it to him now. A length of silver thread. _The bees are disappearing_. Lady. Lady. _Lady_ , let me live in peace. 

“I can’t- I can’t- _Sandor_.”

“Hush, now, little bird. I know. I _know_.” 

It is late, and she’s gotten back home; even if it’s taken her awhile.

There is coffee on the stove that doesn’t burn her, and on the table, with it, length of thread that never dies; the invitation to Arya’s wedding, x-ed out in marker and circled again, the coaster for the cup. There’s a blanket on the sofa, but she knows before asking that he’ll say _Take the bed_. And that, even if he does try to make her go once she’s dragged his own comforter out to them, it won’t matter, really. 

They won’t be getting any sleep.

* 

“I’ve missed this place,” She tells him. It’s an honest sentiment, at least; when she’s clothed like this, in nothing but his nightshirt, and a pair of underwear. “I’ve missed -”

“Aye,” He says, “But there’s naught to be done about that.”

She’s confused him. She can tell because he doesn’t try so hard to hide his accent; that rich, thick wind that twists itself between the vowels of his words. It’s not like she’d wanted that anyways; when they hardly were themselves. But the air tastes like the air from an alternate world. A world where she is more herself; a world where he is more himself, and so they don’t surprise her. The things he says, next.

“Little bird,” He says, because that is what she is to him, “I think you should go home.” 

“I did.” She says, “I did.”

“Aye,” He says, “And then you left again. And I’m saying-"

“Sandor- Sandor, _don’t,_ , I never meant to -"

“That I think that you should go on home. Go on, girl. Give a dog your mercy, and fly away home.”

“I have,” She says, and she is sobbing, now, into a chest that isn’t there, “Sandor, I have, you _know_ that I have - You said you _fucking_ knew me -"

“Thought I knew you, once.” 

“And what’s changed?” She asks, as the sobs abate to sniffles, “What’s changed, between then and now?” 

But Sandor only smiles. The saddest smile that she’s ever seen.

“Nothing had to change, girl.”

“No,” She says, “No, something had to -”

“What changed,” He says, “Is that you’ve failed yourself.”

“No,” She says, and her voice is all steel and conviction, because what right does he have, to tell her who she’s failed? “No, what changed is you’re a liar now. I kept myself alive. I kept myself _alive_ for you.”

“And that was how you did it.” He says, shrugging his shoulders helplessly, “You should’ve done it for yourself, little bird, not for an old hound like me.”

“There wasn’t anything _left of me_ to do it for. You bastard, you fucking _bastard_ \- This is your fault - You let him, you _let him_ do those - those _things_ to me-”

“I let him teach you the lessons that you wouldn’t learn.” He says, and she can see the old anger flood in his bones, “Looks to me as if you haven’t learned them.”

“Fuck you.”

“No,” He says, “Not here, little bird. Not again.” 

“We didn’t-”

“It was close e- _fucking_ -nough.” 

It wasn’t. He had barely touched her, just the skim of fingertips over bra cups, and when she took her clothing off, he hadn't looked at her. He wasn’t, either. She could bury herself in his chest, the way that he was looking at her now. Like he wanted to eat her alive. 

Or dig a grave for her, in some sacred, quiet isle, with the hood of his cowl pulled up ‘round his face, and rain-rust on the blade of the shovel. 

_You should talk to him_. 

_You should_

“How’s Bronn?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know him like you.”

“What the bloody fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Just that - I wouldn’t know if he was well or not. He isn’t my friend. I wouldn’t ask you to tell me how Tyrion’s doing.”

“You knew the Imp better than Bronn of the Blackwater?”

Her chuckle is mirthless.

“We were married.” 

“How could I forget?”

“You seem to have forgotten easier than I did, anyways.”

“I bet you hadn’t.”

“Sandor.” 

“What was it like?”

“What?”

“Fucking the Imp.”

Oh. That.

“I’ll have you know,” She says, “That Tyrion and I never, but that seeing as I, apparently, have never meant a fucking thing to you, it isn’t any of your business to begin with.” 

“To begin with? Girl, it’s my business to the end!” And Christ, but he barks like a hound even, doesn’t he, bitter and dark like the wine he prefers. “You’re forgetting it was I that saved you.” 

“From all of Joffrey’s words? From all of Meryn Trant’s beatings? From the way that Ramsay fucked me?”

Sandor’s hands are tight at his sides. 

“If you had looked last night, you would have seen I suffered it.”

“Little bird-” 

“I suffered it, and I lived. Never knowing why. Never particularly _caring_. There was a time when I would have - cared, about the way that people treated me. And if you’re going to stand there, and tell me that it never even mattered, that I never even _mattered_ to you, and to go back to Winterfell and rot, you will _listen_ to me before I go: That was the _only_ thing that you _ever_ saved me from. Not from Joffrey or his men. Not from Ramsay Bolton. _Certainly_ not from yourself.” 

The air is a lump in his throat. The wounds spread outwards from the tips of his nails. The veins at his temple are throbbing; like other things, she thinks. But his eyes are the ones that are sad.

*

“Don’t.”

*

King’s Landing; after the war. They say the city never sleeps. If you want to be somebody - even if that somebody’s nobody - you go to King’s Landing. If you want to be nobody - even if that nobody’s somebody - you go to the Wall. And if you want to be yourself - that most fickle, dreamlike of states - you stay away from Winterfell.

The house sits on a hill, off the beaten path. A grand old manor with marble railings and elmwood stairs. A place that wasn’t burning, but only because no one’d ever thought to try. It would catch, though. The curtains would catch like in any other fire, and any other young boy’s face would burn, if somebody held it down to the flames.

Winterfell is a garden in this city, and the old gods won’t let it die. 

Nobody goes there, anymore. They say that it’s been abandoned for years. Occasionally the street kids will try to break in, to see to the ghosts and the phantoms that their parents tell them howl in the godswood; or tourists will go to take their wedding photos, dressed in white and framed by hubris.

And the house, as ever, lingers; a summertime’s winter mirage.

If you go to the top of the northern-most tower, and look out to the stars, the locals say that you can see the Lady Catelyn crying; a new constellation. A weeping of yellow-tinged blue. In the bedrooms there are tapestries, and the men inside them move; pressing their hands upon cool linen bedsheets and pale screens of glass. The crypts there are guarded by direwolves; with fur of claw and feather; with beating ravens eyes. 

Or so the rumors say.

But he’s not the kind of man who takes his stock in rumors, so when the traders come to tell their tales of ghosts, he pours himself another drink and doesn’t listen. Not even Bronn would make him do that, anymore.

The city’s changed, since the little bird left. Everything about it, save for Winterfell. A new generation runs the streets, their faces free of the burden of war. The oldest war veterans have dropped dead like mayflies. Melisandre’s name has popped up in banners, advertising politics and Stranger-knows-what. 

And Sansa Stark, for all intents and purposes, is lying in a ditch somewhere, for all he’s heard of her since then.

He tells himself that he didn’t intend to be cruel to her then. In the days when he could have held her, with his hands or his mouth or his body. Held her close; held her down; held her to stop her from falling, tumbling those last five miles to the bottom of the sea. 

A month after she left, the Imp annulled their marriage. He must’ve bribed Varys to do it; in the hopes that she’d returned, because he sure as _hell_ hadn’t done it for him. Tyrion fucking Lannister; with the nerve to come down to the city, an imp on a horse, and make himself contrite. Call her a lady and everything -

_My deepest apologies to the Lady Sansa. She was forced into our marriage against her will, and it is my utmost regret that the circumstances of the past few years have forced me to keep her there_.

It’s bullshit, but everything is.

His leg, even. He can barely walk without his cane on a good day, and the days in King’s Landing have never been good. Sometimes in the morning Bronn is there, telling him that he fell, and that he’d had to carry him home. 

_And he had carried her, past the weirwood tree, with all of that blood on her dress. She had cried and she’d clung to him. With all of that cold in her copper. With all of that blood on her dress._

_Because you drank_ Bronn says, a harsher and less plausible reality than the fact that his body is failing him. 

That his leg is failing him.

That _she_ has failed him.

They say the city sleeps, but maybe that’s just him. Because no matter how his leg aches and spasms, he takes his cane up in his hand and turns the road to Winterfell. To see a glimpse of the grand old mansion house where she doesn’t live anymore. Used to be, there was a time he would’ve knocked the direwolf knocker, but nobody ever answered. And his mind would run through all the places that she could’ve done, filling in guesses with _Alayne_. 

As if she _really_ would’ve gone back to the Vale. 

He had thought to call her brother, but there wasn’t any service at the Wall, and he knew her. When she was done with a place she was done with it. He had been like that - for the briefest interval of time, sometime after he let Joffrey beat her, and before he let her walk away. It was the only time in his life that he’d seen him. The man he was supposed to be. But that man left with Sansa, without even saying goodbye. 

That man left, and the nightmares went with him. Sansa had them, too.

He wouldn’t have known, except that they spent that night - that single, blessed night - together, but her screaming woke him, so loud that he had felt he was at Blackwater Bay again, the Wildfire tearing the sky into pieces. Beneath his arms her limbs contorted violently, and her screams filled the air like cheap perfume. She was dreaming about Petyr, or Ramsay, or Robb. The nightmares with Ramsay were the worst ones, she told him, as he cradled cheeks in calloused palms, for she saw them in the daytime as well as in the night. On the lines and the holes in her body; in the name that was carved on her chest. He should have kissed that name, when he had the chance. Should have kissed them, but he’d pretended that he hadn’t seen them, in the dark.

Eleanor had scars. He didn’t ask her how she got them; he didn’t want to know. She wore them underneath the pockets of her trousers, and draped them in canary-onyx flannels. As he lay in the front room, she redid the bandages and kept the fire low; and told him that their mother was alive. Gregor was at camp that year. Shipped out the day that it was done, that very afternoon. So they were alone in the house, and when he cried, too young to know there wasn’t any use in crying, she had peeled her flannel off and shown him. And seeing that he wasn’t the only one his brother’d hurt had helped it not to hurt, for awhile. I’m here, she’d said. I’m breathing. She had also imparted him with a slim observation. One day, his sister’d told her, when their father saw Ser Ned on the news and changed the channel, Every Stark that ever lived will be buried in their crypts. And he listens to her say it, every _fucking_ time he goes to Winterfell. 

The day comes, anyways.

It’s a bad day, for his leg, but he can’t _not_ go to Winterfell. He can’t _not_ see Winterfell through the same eyes she saw it through, so he calls Bronn, supporting his weight on the wall with half of his body. The other half is dead. _I need,_ he’d begun, and Bronn had stopped him. _I know,_ , he’d said, _I can be there in five._

“I heard that Sansa died,” He said.

They had driven up the main road. When the Boltons’ held the place, they’d used starving hounds to enforce the ‘No Trespassing’ signs. Now he was the only hound there. 

“Who the fuck told you that?” 

“Friend of a friend.” Bronn said, “Friend of Tormund. Said that he heard it from Bran.”

“Right,” He had said, and scoffed, and felt his heart breaking to pieces, “Because we can trust the fucking raven boy.”

“Raven boy?”

“Calls himself the ‘Three Eyed Raven’, or some bullshit like that. I - Sansa told me. Said he was wrong,” He’d added, “About a lot of things.”

“Not this,” Bronn’d said, “I hope.” 

The story went Jon Snow had pulled an Arya. Had a list of names of all the men who’d wronged, and Sansa had been there. The story went she’d pulled an Arya at Winterfell's weirwood tree, though they wouldn’t call it that.

“The _fuck_ is that supposed to mean?”

“I met her,” Bronn had said, almost conversationally, “She asked me to pick up your key. You didn’t need it, so I threw it in a well, but I went and met her first. The woman who broke your fucking heart - Did you really think I wouldn’t?”

“I didn’t know-” 

“Sandor.”

Bronn had never called him that.

“Why are you lying to me?”

“I’m not lying,” He says, “I knew she saw you - I didn’t know it was on _purpose_.”

“You didn’t need me telling you.” Bronn shrugged, “It’s not like she told me anything that was important.”

“What - What did she tell you?” He asks, and not a little hoarsely. 

“She blamed you,” Bronn told him. 

“She - what?” 

“She blamed you for making her a terrible person. She blamed you for making her the kind of person that couldn’t love another person. She isn’t wrong.”

“Bronn-"

“I hate her.” 

“Bronn-” 

“I know that you don’t, but fuck, I can’t see your reasons. It doesn’t matter if she’s right or not - she shouldn’t have done it. So yes, I hope Bran wasn’t lying. _Look at you,_ Sandor!”

“I hate her, too.”

Bronn slaps him with the full force of a gunshot.

“ _Look at you_ , Sandor. She’s made you a _liar._ ”

“I loved her.” He said, and waited for Bronn to swallows his words. “I _love her_ , Bronn.” 

He didn’t take them back.

* 

“She isn’t dead.” Bran says, “She’s dying.”

They’re eating at the murder zone. He wonders if he should tell the raven that Sansa still has fucking _nightmares_ about what happened here, but decides against it.

“What’s killing her?” He asks. He doesn’t expect an answer, not from someone as vague and dramatic and thinks-himself-a-god-like as Bran. Bran answers him, though, with less emotion than an emptied-out well.

“Nothing,” He says. “She hurt you, and it’s keeping her alive. But she’ll get over you, someday. It’s only a matter of time.” 

He agreed to the meeting after he learned about the amputation. He would’ve had Bronn carry him, but he’s a stubborn prick, sometimes, and he had to do this himself. Had to drag himself here, for Stranger’s sake, because it wouldn’t matter, otherwise.

“You’ll find her,” Says Bran, a pale shadow of adult conversation. “I dream that all the time, you know. You’ll find her, and she might be dead, and you might dig her grave, gravedigger. Or she’ll smile at you and tell you - nevermind. That one was the dream, I think. You’d better get a shovel.” 

“Couldn’t use one,” He says. “Would have to be standing, for that.” 

“Have your lover do it, then.”

“Don’t have a lover.”

“He wants to be. He already is. If you ran that way - "

“I don’t.”

“He doesn’t, either. But there’s something that he sees in you. The same thing Sansa did. I would ask her, if she wasn’t dying.”

“Is it true?” He asks, then, as the silence stretches into a crescendo, “That-”

“Survival is a concept that I didn’t need. The Raven always lives in someone. I don’t need emotions, either; don’t ask me about these things.”

“But?”

“She is. I’ve been deader than she is for years. Even Arya knew.” His voice sounds far away as he says it, as if he’s falling off the tower, still. “She cares about me,” He says, “But I’ll never be able to do the same. That’s the difference between us.”

“Can’t care for a dead woman,” He says, and stifles an agony-laugh.

“No,” Says Bran, “You can’t. But you can find her, still. I used to be a dreamer. Find her, Sandor, and care. I think you have it in you.” 

“If I did,” He says, “What the fuck would I tell her?”

The Three-Eyed Raven smiles, then.

“When you find her,” He says, “All you have to do is ask.”

*

“Tormund’s getting married.”

“Is he?”

“He invited you.”

“And?”

“He invited Sansa, too.”

* 

He doesn’t know the woman, or that rules had changed, but here they are again. He’s not used to the feeling of his leg not hurting, yet, so he sits at the end of the pew and sends Bronn to get him punch. Bronn doesn’t.

“Does it ever strike you as funny?” Bronn asks, “That we keep doing opposite day?”

It isn’t strictly true. He _does_ know the woman, but only through a terse interrogation and fucking decades of fucking Tormund being over-the-fucking-moon. He got the feeling that it wasn’t supposed to get this far, for them. He had never thought he would be coming to their wedding. But here he is again. Sitting at the end of a pew, by the wall, refusing to look over his shoulder lest he see why Bronn’s taking so long with the punch. Their vows are pretty, and the punch is too sweet for his liking, but it’s worth it for the aftermath. 

“I didn’t know that you knew Tormund.” 

“I didn’t know you knew Brienne.”

He never thought he’d be a liar, either, but here he is, again. 

Maybe both of them have transferrable skill sets.

“Winterfell’s a fucking waste,” He says.

“Let it be. It wasn’t my home to begin with.” 

“Wasn't it?”

“I thought you knew,” She tells him, and her eyes are as sad as the sea. “Winterfell’s a ghost ship.”

_Where have you been?_ flits through his mind, and

“Would you like me to get you some punch?”

“No,” She says, “I’ve been working on that.”

“And it’s been going well?”

“As well as anything goes.” She tells him. “Better than us.”

“Us.” He says. It’s sweeter than the punch. “Did you even want there to be an ‘us’?”

“Yes.”

“Would you like there to be one again?"

And in that moment, he can tell. 

There are always going to be wounds that they rip open, and there are always going to be nights she’s only holding his hand because it’s not a bottle, but when she thinks of them he’ll make damn sure she thinks his hands are warm and strong enough to hold her up. 

“Yes.” She says. 

He clutches her close to his body, and she doesn’t fly away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DID I MENTION 
> 
> That I listen to way too much music while writing? Here are the four songs that I had on repeat while I was writing this chapter, in case anyone wants to get into my headspace while this mess created itself. 
> 
> _Age of Consent_ by New Order
> 
> _Hope Is a Heartache_ by LÉON
> 
> _Blackbird_ by The Beatles
> 
> _Ikk Kudi_ by Shahid Mallya


End file.
